Drying coffee beans in Latin America is responsible for the clearing of large swaths of rainforest for fuel wood. Solar dryers may be the solution.

by Curtis Runyan

(Washington, DC, January 2004) If you drank coffee this morning, you are most likely responsible for clearing a patch of rainforest about the size of your coffee mug. That's the amount of forest, in Latin America at least, that is cleared for firewood to dry the beans required for a cup of coffee. And if you drink a cup every morning, that adds up to a lot of forest: each year in Latin America, about 65 square kilometers (16,000 acres) are cut to fuel coffee drying, according to the Mesoamerican Development Institute.

This loss of forest is occurring despite the major environmental inroads coffee producers have made in recent years. Today many coffee shops give you the choice of buying a cup of organic coffee, grown without pesticides. Or fair trade coffee that directs more profits to local farmers. There's also bird-friendly, shade-grown coffee, which does not require a plantation to clear the rainforests in which its coffee plants can grow.

Still, these environment-friendly coffee beans -- just like their conventional counterparts -- need to be dried after the berries are picked. And currently that's being done with tons of firewood and diesel fuel.

"The largest threat to forests right now is not shade-coffee plantations being cleared and converted to technified plantations," said Raul Raudales, an energy engineer who has been working to develop forest-friendly technologies. "The biggest impact on forests is the use of firewood to dry the coffee." Coffee is the second largest traded commodity worldwide. So the amount of forest cleared to dry millions of coffee berries each year is large.

Raudales and his team have developed an efficient alternative to the massive blast-furnace dryers that are used to dry coffee all over the world. His company, Solar Trade, builds a solar coffee dryer, which uses a high-tech heating chamber kept hot by solar heaters and super-efficient fans, to dry the coffee beans. On rainy days or at night, the dryers get their heat from burning the husks of previously dried coffee berries.

In 2003 Solar Trade won a competition organized by New Ventures, an initiative of the World Resources Institute, which aims to link up green entrepreneurs with business assistance and investment capital. In the past five years the program has helped more than 20 companies receive over $6 million in venture capital.

Right now there are three solar dryers in operation, two in Costa Rica and one in Nicaragua. There is already some demand in Europe for the solar-dried coffee. "We call it 'Café Solar,'" said Richard Trubey, the company's vice president for marketing. "We are promoting the benefits of preserving the forest by not burning it to dry coffee."

The design for the conventional industrial dryers that are in widespread use hasn’t changed in the last 80 years. The old-school dryers heat the coffee by trucking in fire wood or diesel fuel. Large horsepower fans blow the hot air through the wet coffee beans, requiring large amounts of electricity.

"So the energy consumption each year at a facility that handles 10,000 sacks of coffee -- which is small, there are many others that produce 20 times that -- costs about $20,000 for electricity and firewood," said Raudales. "For the solar dryer, those costs are about $1,700." In many parts of Latin America electricity prices have been rising rapidly in the past decade, increasing by about 20 percent a year.

Another benefit of the solar dryer is that it produces a higher quality bean, says Raudales. "Because conventional equipment is so expensive to run, operators will try to save money by cranking up the temperature so the beans dry more quickly. That adversely affects the quality by vaporizing the essential oils in the bean that give it aroma and flavor," he said.

"Solar Trade has negotiated mechanisms to allow cooperatives to finance the purchase of the dryers," said Amy Sprague, who coordinates Latin American programs for WRI's New Ventures. "This allows groups of farmers to add value to their product, as the dried beans are worth a lot more on the market than the unprocessed beans." One of the largest cooperatives in Costa Rica now sends its best quality coffee to be dried in a solar dryer at Montes de Oro, a fair trade coffee cooperative with about 500 farmers. Paying to use the solar dryer is cheaper than using its own, aging equipment.

Despite the potential savings, Solar Trade has found it difficult to break into the well-entrenched coffee drying market with its dryer. "The people are very risk adverse -- especially at a time of low coffee prices -- to investing in coffee infrastructure and investing in something different," said Trubey.

Solar Trade estimates that the efficiency savings alone would easily cover a company's cost of changing to solar within seven to eight years, based on energy savings alone. "It makes sense for these companies to change right now, whether they have newer or older equipment, simply because the conventional systems require a tremendous amount of energy and money to operate," said Trubey. (WRI Features, 846 words)