Or: why the most sustainable thing you can do with water is not put it on a ship and sail it across the globe.
Every so often someone tells us, with the confidence of a person who has never weighed a batch, that roasting at origin is a climate crime. Green beans travel well, roasted coffee doesn't, so the responsible model is to ship green to Portland or Melbourne and roast it there. Close to the customer. Low impact. Very sensible.
It sounds right. It also skips the part where you put the coffee on a scale.
Start with the scale
Green coffee is a seed with water in it. Specialty green is graded at roughly 10–12% moisture by weight; the washed Bourbon from Finca Las Nubes reads about 10.2–10.3% on our meter.
Roasting gets rid of the water, and then some. Weigh what goes into our roaster against what ends up in the bag and it lands around 17%, give or take, across the lineup. The interesting part is how differently coffees get there. Volcano, our dark roast, loses about 17% in the drum and almost nothing at the color sorter. Pacamara Natural, roasted medium-light, loses only about 14% in the drum, but the sorter pulls several times more rejects from it than from Volcano. Dark coffees lose it to heat; light coffees lose it to the sorter.
And then there's Gesha. Roasted light, it's so pale that even with the sorter at its gentlest setting, over a pound came off the reject chute, much of it perfectly good coffee the machine couldn't tell from a defect. So we pick through the rejects by hand, run them through again, and pick again. It's slow and tedious, and at some point you give up and toss some good coffee out with the bad. That's human nature: try picking through a pound of light-roasted beans looking for the slightly lighter ones, or the one with a pinhole. It's exactly the kind of loss that never shows up in a tidy shrinkage percentage.
Water is the biggest chunk of that, since green coffee is 10–12% moisture. The rest is CO₂, volatiles, chaff, and the beans the optical sorter kicks out: quakers, pseudo-quakers and other defects that were never going to taste good. None of it is anything you'd pay to drink.
So for every 100 kg of green coffee that crosses an ocean, roughly 15 to 20 kg never make it into a cup: 10–12 kg of water vented out a roaster stack, the rest smoke, chaff and rejects. With luck it gets composted, often not. About one sack in six is a stowaway.
Zoom out and it's one container in six. For every six boxes of coffee leaving Santos in Brazil, the equivalent of one (about 42,000 lb of cargo, plus a steel box that weighs another two tonnes on its own) is carrying nothing anyone will ever drink.
Now scale it up
In the 2024/25 coffee year the world exported about 121 million 60-kg bags of green coffee (ICO Coffee Market Report, Oct 2025). That's around 7.3 million tonnes.
At ~11% moisture, that's about 800 million liters of water, roughly 210 million US gallons or about 320 Olympic swimming pools, loaded on trucks, stacked in warehouses, craned onto ships, floated across oceans, trucked again, stored again, and finally blown out of a roaster stack in Hamburg or Oakland. Count the full roast loss and you're past a billion kilos a year of cargo that exists purely to be vented.
Per container it's easier to picture. A standard 20-foot box carries around 320 bags, about 19 tonnes of green. Roughly 2,100 liters of that is water, and the full roast loss is over three tonnes. Nobody would knowingly pay to ship three tonnes of nothing. Importers do it every day. It's just baked into the price per pound, so nobody has to look at it.
The defects ride along too
Water isn't the only freeloader. Most of the coffee traded on this planet is commodity coffee, and commodity coffee is allowed to be dirty. The benchmark Arabica futures contract (the "C" price everyone quotes) accepts delivered coffee carrying up to 23 full imperfections in a grading sample (ICE Coffee rules, Rule 8.04 and Appendix II): black and sour beans, broken and insect-bored beans, pods, husks, the odd stick or stone. Specialty grade allows zero primary defects and only a handful of minor ones.
Those defects get bagged, trucked, containerized, shipped, warehoused and trucked again before anyone sorts them out in a consuming country, if they get sorted out at all. Across hundreds of millions of pounds a year, that's an enormous tonnage of beans nobody ever wanted, burning fuel on every leg of the trip.
Ours come out here. Every batch runs through our color sorter before it's packed, and the rejects never leave El Salvador. What ships is coffee that made the cut. Nothing else.
Then there are the warehouses
And then there's the route itself. A typical path for green coffee into a consuming market:
- Farm → mill
- Mill → exporter's warehouse
- Exporter → port and container yard (for El Salvador, Acajutla)
- Ocean freight, often with a transshipment
- Destination port → customs → importer's warehouse
- Importer → roaster, sometimes via another regional warehouse
- Roaster → distributor or retailer → you
Every arrow is a truck. Every noun is a building that's lit, cooled, or at least forklifted. Each layer also takes a margin, which is a separate rant about who actually gets paid for coffee.
Ours:
- Mill → our roastery, about a 90-minute drive
- Roastery → you
The water stays here. The middle warehouses simply don't exist.
Our parcels fly. Order from us online and your bag goes by DHL. Air freight is one of the most carbon-intensive ways to move anything. We're not going to pretend otherwise. But there is nuance. The plane will take off regardless, and a full plane is more efficient than an empty plane. Global logistics networks are optimized for efficiency at its maximum.
Weight matters, especially in air freight. Roasting removes water before the coffee travels by courier. That reduces the mass we're shipping on the leg where transport emissions can be particularly high, even if it doesn't eliminate the impact of flying the parcel. We use the smallest box possible and add the highest amount of coffee possible to it to optimize the volume-weight equation.
"Roasted near you" doesn't mean "shipped less." The green coffee still had to get there. Your local bag also took a long ride, with many steps along the way. It just started thousands of kilometers earlier, hauling water around the world that would eventually be boiled off just closer to you
The bottom line
Roasting at origin isn't automatically green, and roasting near the customer isn't automatically virtuous. But if a sustainability argument depends on paying to haul 800 million liters of water around the planet so it can be vented in someone else's city, it isn't an argument.
It's simply not as black and white as it might initially seem.
We'd rather leave the water here. With El Niño hitting as hard as it is this year, we could use it.
GoodBeans & Racc Roasters