One activity i partake in that results in a lot of energy loss is the drinking of coffee and tea. To start, energy is lost because the plants that produce these ingredients are not built efficiently. That is to say that they don’t collect the maximum amount of sun and water available to them. We could rectify this by genetically engineering some vine growing varieties of coffee and tea plants.
The next step in the coffee and tea production process involves shipping these plants to manufacturing facilities where they are either bagged or roasted. We could easily curb the inefficiency of bagged tea by mandating global usage of tea steepers by the year 2015, a change that wouldn’t be too difficult to make, allowing us to sell zero-waste, looseleaf tea. And to roast coffee beans, we could simply set the coffee vines on fire, thereby allowing us to collect and roast them in one step. This new “darkest” roast could easily be incorporated into Starbucks drinks with its ashy, earthy notes.
Even more energy is lost as the beverages are prepared, seeing as water has to be heated to make them. We could design every coffee and tea water heater with a small collector and generator for the steam they produce to recapture some of the energy of the steam, convert it into electricity and use that energy for the continues heating of coffee and tea. Lastly, a lot of heat is lost because these heating technologies are poorly insulated. With that, we can wrap each of our water heating vessels with a insulating styrofoam layer to retain heat. In fact, we can probably install each heating vessel with a thermoelectrical generator, thereby saving even more on electricity expenditures!
Finally, energy is lost in the form of manufacturing, shipping, and disposing of the cups that we drink from. The easiest way to rectify this is to stop producing cups and start cupping our hands in order to capture our drinks and carry them around all day. Alternatively, we could use reusable containers to hold our beverages.
