Coffee and the Environment: The Hidden Cost of Your Daily Brew

0:00 Most people drink coffee every day without a second thought yet you know that it's one of the top drivers of global deforestation and ocean pollution. Tell Hiney a human rights lawyer turned environmental activists discovered that coffee is tied not only to deforestation, but also to slavery, toxic chemical use, and the degradation of critical marine ecosystems. After years investigating abuses in cocoa, rubber, and seafood industries, tell founded coffee, watch to expose how the coffee supply chain harms both people. And the planet. Her research revealed that many certified ethical coffee brands still fall short, failing to ensure living wages, environmental protection, or even traceability with some link to modern slavery.

0:47 In today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, it tell shares. How you can make simple, powerful changes in your daily coffee habits to protect rainforest, defend human rights, and safeguard our oceans. Let's start the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening in the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And today we're talking about coffee and you're probably wondering, Andrew, why are we talking about coffee? You don't even drink coffee, and that is true. I do not drink coffee. Not that I don't like coffee. I don't think I've ever actually tried coffee to the point where I'm like giving it a really good shake.

1:31 I am actually just not a coffee drinker. There's no worries of me ever drinking coffee. I have no urge to drink coffee. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. And I have nothing against people who drink coffee. I actually enjoy the smell of coffee. My wife has coffee and it smells great in the house when she does have that, but it's really difficult to know if you are drinking coffee that's actually good for the planet, for people who are growing it and so forth, just like seafood. So I wanted to have someone on the podcast to talk about how to choose the proper coffee and how to go forward and make sure that you can drink conscious free coffee to make sure you can get through your day. So I had to tell Higonnet on the podcast today, she is the founder and executive director of Coffee Watch, where they look at all things coffee related and looking at the entire supply chain and finding out what is good and what is bad, and oftentimes terrible within this industry.

2:23 And how we can make it better. So she's gonna talk about her journey from human rights lawyer in conflict areas like war zones that have to deal with torture and so forth, all the way to the coffee industry and how that's kind of related and from a human rights perspective. We're gonna talk a lot about that. We're gonna talk about the coffee industry. We're gonna talk about how some of the major corporations can have a huge difference just like they did in the seafood industry, and how we can find more ways to live sustainably just by drinking a cup of coffee. It's gonna be a great show. Before we get into the interview though, I would like to say if you want to find out more ways that you can be guided towards living for a better planet and a better ocean, you can do so by joining the undertow that's go to Speak up for blue.com/join the undertow.

3:08 That's speak up for blue.com/join the undertow. All one word. You can join our community of action where we guide you to make better choices, not only from a knowledge standpoint and learn about the ocean, but say, Hey, how do we buy the right coffee? How do we buy the right seafood? How do we make sure that we're drinking outta the right containers and so forth, and making sure we're making healthy choices not only for us, but for our planet and for our ocean? Go to speak up for blue.com/join the undertow. Here's the interview with Itel Hiney from Coffee Watch Learning all about coffee and how to make better choices for better planet. Enjoy the interview and I will talk to you after. Hey Itel, welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Are you ready to talk about all things coffee and the environ?

3:52 I am so excited to be here. Nice. I'm very excited too. This is something that's very new to me. I'm not a coffee drinker, full disclosure. Uh, but I know so many people who drink coffee, including everybody else in my household except for my dogs. And even I feel like my dogs would drink it if it was on the ground. So, you know, let's, let's just put that out there. Um, but I know like coffee is such a huge part of everybody's life. You know, you hear people say, I can't function without my coffee. There's t-shirts, like, but coffee, you know, they all have these types of signs and everybody loves their coffee. But when you think about where coffee comes from, how it's made, how it's farmed, who farms it, you know what the process is, how it affects the environment, there are a lot of things that go into it that we are not really.

4:38 Uh, uh, told about, or, or aware of in terms of what happens within the coffee industry and are we drinking coffee? That is one sustainable, actually free trade. You hear people talk about free trade coffee. So we're gonna get into all these different questions and really dispel some of the myths and really understand how the coffee industry works in 2025 and what we can do as people who drink coffee can do to make it better and, and, and just have a better conscious when they're actually buying coffee and, and making sure they're making the right decision. So, uh, without hopefully interfering with their lives too much or paying, uh, the wazoo for, for coffee, right? So we're gonna get into all that, but before we do, Al, why don't you let us know who you are and what you do.

5:23 Sure. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here on your show. I am a human rights and environmental activist and lawyer. You can probably tell from my name I'm French American. Uh, but I, yeah, I, I went to the United States for university and from law school at Yale and worked, um, a little bit into war crimes, tribunals, and that sort of set me on this trajectory of. Trying to combat crimes against humanity. Mm-hmm. So after the war crimes courts in Sierra Leone and in Cambodia, I worked with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, mostly in war zones and post-conflict areas. Wow. And the International Human Rights Law Institute.

6:04 So the first like 12 years of my life were dominated by a somewhat grim reality of documenting Yeah. Really awful things that people do to one another like rape and torture and killings. But I'm, I'm actually a very positive glass possible kind of person. I know that sounds crazy. And I, I do believe in fundamentally in, in the goodness of humanity. And I had this moment where I realized that one reason there's so many wars and conflicts is because. You know, we're entering an era of climate chaos, and it's already turbocharging, huh.

6:44 And deepening conflicts and making conflicts appear where none were before and making them worse when they interesting. And so I decided to go work at, at Greenpeace. Um, okay. Combat climate change as best I could. And I ended up as research director for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia, working a lot on oceans and actually trying to, um, combat seafood slavery as well as overfishing, but also just a lot on deforestation and other environmental issues. And that sort of, I don't know, it just ignited this passion in me to both defend the environment and human rights. And when I was at Greenpeace and then also this other organization I worked in, it's called Mighty Earth, I guess.

7:25 Maybe describe it as a spinoff of Green Peas. Yeah. Um, yeah. One thing that I had wanted to do was to work on all the top seven drivers of global deforestation. Okay. And at green we did an amazing job on the big four palm oil pulp and paper cattle, soy, but we never really were able to tackle cocoa, coffee and rubber. So at Night Earth, I started these cocoa and rubber campaigns that were awesome and we love so many of our campaign really helped to transform a lot of things in those industries, which are not great by any means, but Right. There's, um, this really amazing journey towards rapid change in, in rubber and cocoa that I sort of figured out all the best things that we had done at Greenpeace for palm oil and brought it into cocoa and rubber, um, along with the best things that I remembered from amnesty and human Rights Watch days.

8:15 And it just taught me that you can transform. Mm-hmm. Really destructive industries. So after taking two years off with, um, my beautiful baby boy, I thought, ah, I got knighted. What should I do with this knighthood? I'm gonna try to now turn to the last of the big seven drivers of deforestation that gets almost no attention, which is coffee, right? Nobody works on it. Not Greenpeace, not mighty Earth, not amnesty, not human rights Watch. Just decided this orphan subject, and yet it's the number six driver. Of global deforestation and it's powering ocean destruction, slavery, and child labor. And I thought, okay, that's what I'm gonna use my neighborhood for. I'm gonna try right. Change the coffee industry if I can.

8:57 So that's where we are now. I guess you could best describe Coffee Watch. It's like if Amnesty and Green Peas got together and had a baby and that baby just wanted to work on coffee. Well, I, you know, I think it's really important too, and, and we'll, we'll get into this more as, as the interview progresses. 'cause I wanna really start to get your mindset of when you started off and your first, even before you started your career and, and get your schooling, your thought process of what you want to do when, like, growing up and how it related to coffee or even just human rights and everything. But it's, it's interesting how, you know, we look at the top 10 of what the, the top 10 drivers of, of deforestation coffee is one of them, but there isn't much information.

9:40 On how it's destructive or even movement on that. And you know, even like, you know, you know, organizations like Green Pieces and, and a C International and all the WWF, all these other organizations that are so massive, they focus on specific aspects of, you know, deforestation. Uh, but it's funny how coffee is kind of slipped aside and, and you know, not many people are working on if it's more than one, uh, as, as opposed to a coffee shop. A coffee watch. It'd be interesting to, to hear that, but let's go. But I, I, I kind of wanna go back a little bit in time and you've, you've mentioned that you've covered some pretty emotionally and mentally draining and I'm sure physically as well, but, uh, uh, and intense cases and, and exper work experience when you were studying even before when you were, you know, a teenager.

10:33 Did you always have that drive to like that? I guess it's, it's a bit of a political, but also human rights drive to stick up for the person who, or the people who couldn't defend themselves or who went through a hardship Always. Yeah. And if anything is, you know, Andrew, I think most of us start out that way, but somehow life crushes a lot of people along the path. But yeah, ever since I was young, I, I knew the world was not quite right. You know, all this injustice and poverty and human rights abuses. I think many people know that the world is not quite right.

11:15 Yeah, for sure. But, um, somehow my family and friends gave me this weird, wild, crazy idea that I could. Change that to make the world a better place. So I think I'm very lucky that I, um, got that memo, especially one of my professors. Mm-hmm. I was an undergrad named Greg Grandin. Greg Grandin, he just changed my world. And another Professor Ben Kernan. They're both just the most amazing mentors and yeah, I, I will be internally grateful to them for teaching me that, you know, every time you see something wrong mm-hmm. You can always, always do something about it.

11:57 And that's a very difficult thing to, I mean, it's easy to tell a child or to tell a, a student, an undergraduate student, to say, Hey, look, you know, we need to stand up for what's wrong in this world. There, there are a lot of things wrong with this world, uh, and we need to stand up. But a lot of people, uh, don't want to, it, it takes a lot of bravery. It takes a lot of courage to stand up for something and speak out against something. You can speak out about anything these days and get criticism. And a lot of people are worried about the criticism that they get. They don't wanna, uh, you know, take too much of a, a controversial stance or they don't want to go opposite of what the main purpose of, you know, or, or the main sort of thought process of a specific issue. Uh, you know.

12:38 Even as an example, obviously we're not gonna discuss it, but like the, you know, the what's happening in Gaza, in, in Israel, it's a very difficult issue even just to have a conversation with, you know, within your household or, uh, within a, within a context of a public setting because everybody's so, or a lot of people who are so divided and, but want to see a solution in some sort of capacity as a, as a child. It's like, I've got two teenagers at home, two teenage girls at home, and it's like, you know, sometimes you want them to stand up for something and you want them to stand up for what's right and then there are, but there are sometimes there are consequences to that. Was there, was there anything in your, uh, whether you were in high school or undergraduate level, like a specific moment that you kind of remember standing up for something that you may not have had to, but you felt it was really important to say, Hey, you know what, like this is wrong and we really need to be able to tackle this or be able to discuss this, this particular issue.

13:33 You know, something that really, um, motivated me when I was younger, when I was a teenager, I found out that my grandfather Kapa had done small things with the franchise sauce. Okay. And he was not a big hero. Yeah, right. He just, uh, he was an engineer and he apparently, according to one of my uncles, um, who's also a very, very talented math, science brain, um, he kapa made microfiche mm-hmm. Papers for the ALS and the microfiche. You can roll them up very small Yeah. Persons and put them in like a cigarette case or a matchbox or a cylinder of a bicycle. And, um, you know, the fact that my grandfather did something that was so small and niche.

14:21 But so important and so courageous and just that he was like this tiny little cog mm-hmm. In a big machine. I mean, not that the French resistance was big enough, it should have been bigger. His, well, it, during World War ii, they're under attack. It's, it's, yeah. It, it was not easy to be in the his, and yet we wished that the, his results had been bigger. But, you know, just knowing that you don't have to be a super mega hero. Right. You know, K Peppa was not like Right. Right. He was always just a father of three kids who was an engineer and made his little microfiche what he could for these, his, his cells guys, and, you know, it was an act of courage. Mm-hmm. It was probably really hard for him.

15:01 Mm-hmm. And I'm not sure, it'll be scary for my grandmother if she found that For sure. But it, you know, every little thing matters. And I think knowing that you don't have to be a hero. You don't have to mm-hmm. You know, save the world. All you have to do is just do the best you can in the moment. Yeah. With the time that you have and the abilities that you have. Just this moment, just do the best. But I think that's kind of what set me on my path in a way. I, I love that story because, I mean, if you think about that age of Sistance and, and World War ii, he could have been killed for that. For, you know, creating those microfiche for all we know, you know, you never know. He may have helped even one or two people to get to safety or, you know, get further ahead in, in, in what they were trying to do.

15:46 I think that's a, that's a very important fact to realize. We don't all have to have our names in the history books. To have, uh, to make a difference. And, and sometimes small changes or making those little voices, you know, matter can matter to a couple people that could change something else, that could change the world, that can change anything. You never know what's what's gonna happen. Mm-hmm. Right. You, you, you just never know. Now, you know, with that type of mindset, that having that history and knowing of that history going into law, a lot of people will go into, I, I don't think I've ever had, uh, a friend of mine go into law. Friends of mine go into law. That wasn't like corporate law. It was all business. It's usually business focused. That's, I feel like that's a, a popular thing to go into.

16:27 'cause it's, it's stable. It's, you know, you can make pretty good money out of it. And there are some that go into environmental law and human rights law, but not often. So what was it for you when you were choosing that? Like, tell me the process of like choosing it and why you would choose to follow human rights law, if that's what it was. Or, or if it was a different type of law. I think most people don't want to go into human rights and environ law because it's sort of a life of pen for sure. Yeah. You can make so much money working for a law firm, but um, you know, even people who do go into law firms will often take on pro bono cases. Yeah. And amazingly good things for the world that way.

17:10 So I don't feel like it's an either or situation. But yeah, for me, I, I, I did once work at a corporate law firm for eight weeks. Um, and then that was it. It was just enough money so that I could go work in the work crimes space that I wanted to. Almost nothing. Yeah. Um, yeah, I, I did that very, very briefly. Um, Sullivan Cromwell. Um, yeah, it was a weird, weird side moment in my life, but I just always knew that I wanted to do human rights and environmental work. Um, especially human rights work when I was younger. That was just, um. Like, not even a, a doubt in my mind because Right. I just thought to myself, you know, Andrew, why is it that there are these people who are just like me?

17:58 Literally, there's like no difference. Mm-hmm. They have been born in my shoes. They would be the ones going to Yale Law School. Why is it that these people are earning under $2 a day? Mm-hmm. Are being, are being tortured. You know, this, it's so unfair. I just don't want to live in a world with that level of unfairness without for sure. Something about it. Yeah. And, but it's a heavy toll to take, to take on those cases. To work on those cases to Definitely, definitely. Yeah. It's, I remember when I worked in Iraq, I kind of stopped sleeping. Yeah. And also when I worked in this, uh, civil war in, in West Africa, I, um, my hair started falling out and I lost like five kilos.

18:43 It was not a, I bet healthy time. Definitely. It's hard sometimes to do this kind of work. It's true. What allows you to survive those times, like mentally and emotionally? That's very easy. Love. Love to Right. I have such wonderful friends and family. My husband is the best husband in the whole world. He's like, my whole support team rolled into one person. If you could have like queer eye for the straight guy, he is like Brazilian eye for it. And you said he works for the United Nations as well, right? He does. He does? Yeah. Okay. So he works for the United Nations. So he's, you know, obviously into, is it the same line of work, like human rights or, you know, just helping out different countries.

19:29 Like I know I have a friend who works in this, in this type of work and he's been in, uh, in Syria and in like some pretty heavy places, you know, like civil war places. That could be pretty, pretty dangerous. So it's connected, but my husband works in public health. He's a public health hero. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And so, um, you know, if you think about how this is all interconnected, Andrew, you know, we're deforesting the world at a rapid clip. Mm-hmm. That's something that I've worked on at Greenpeace and Mighty Earth and now coffee watch. But when we deforest, not only does it knock all our rainfall off kilter, turbocharges, climate change, most people don't know this, but a third of climate change is from agriculture.

20:12 Right. Um, it does crazy stuff to our oceans. Um, it just crazy stuff to our whole planet. But it also means that we're going further and further into the heart of where wildlife used to have safe habitats without contact with humans. And so the closer we go into these wild areas, the more we get exposed to new novel pathogens. Mm-hmm. And the more we have factory farms, which is the other thing that I worked on a lot at Greenpeace and Mighty Earth, you know, these terrible factory farms. You squeeze lots of animals together and mm-hmm. Dirty, filthy, unhygienic, horrible conditions. It's basically torture. Yeah. Before we kill them.

20:53 And which also by the way, is terrible for oceans. 'cause all their poop goes straight into the ocean and creates these enormous dead zones that same. Um, Catho system. These, these, these concentrated farming operations also is like a Petri dish for bird flu and swine flu and crazy diseases. And so in a way, the environmental stuff that I work on is also rolling the dice. These, these horrible crimes of deforestation, factory farming. The way we do it now, it rolls the dice for these spectacular diseases like COVID. Like HIV. Mm-hmm. Like bird flu, like swine flu. And then you have these heroes, like my husband, who are trying to pick up the pieces and save everyone and vaccinate people and get the medicine and the tests out all over to stop us from all dying in large numbers essentially.

21:45 They're doing the mop-up operations to compensate for corporations totally irresponsible behavior that activists like myself have not been able to curb or stop. So in a way I or hold him accountable for, right? Like that's a hold him accountable. So I think that is connected to my work. He's like the emergency mop up guys that come and try to save humanity when we've made ourselves sick by killing our planet. Yeah. That, uh, I mean it's, it is great to be able to, to work with somebody like that or to live with somebody who works in such a, a, an interesting field like that as you do as well. Um, now, you know, you work in this, you, you mentioned you work in this, this, this heavy, heavy, uh, intense sort of field of, of human rights, looking at war crimes and people being tortured and, and so forth.

22:32 And then you start moving a little bit more environmental, um. You know, it's a, this, it's a switch. I can see the switch because a lot of the en environmental and conservation needs and issues that we're facing, a lot of them are human rights. Uh, they're human rights violations, fishery slaves. As you mentioned, when you worked, uh, in Asia, there was, um, there was, there's, you know, fishery slaves as we talked about on this podcast before. Um, and, and so that's, was that the, sort of the general move as you started to look at human rights, these files would start to come up where you work at Greenpeace and you're like, okay, let's start looking at these different aspects of conservation issues and how they, they relate to human rights.

23:12 Yeah. Andrews, this is such a deep and good question. I think that human rights and environmental problems often tend to be the two sides of the exact same coin. Mm. One of the most fascinating things that we found out when I was at Greenpeace when I was um, our Southeast Asia research director, was that all these vessels. That were the most implicated in IUU fishing. Yep. In pirate fishing and overfishing and fishing juveniles and fishing out of season fishing in marine protected areas. Basically the vessels that are trashing the ocean disproportionately, they also had some of the worst human rights violations.

23:59 Mm-hmm. They were just floating prisons. Hmm. And not just with seafood slaves, but in order to keep people in that level of servitude, they would deploy immense amounts of violence, torture, killings, threats, confiscating people's papers. Right. And beating them. You know, this is. But I remember I was working in Bangkok with the Oceans team there, and my flatmate was this fantastic reporter for the Guardian who broke open this landmark first ever, um, expose of seafood slavery. The Guardian is like at the heart of that. And then after Guardian Ian Orbin at the New York Times did some work and AP did some fantastic work.

24:44 Um, and then it sort of spread. But I remember what I would, I would come back to work from home from talking with my flat name Kate, this wonderful journalist, Kate. I wish she could have gotten like every medal for best journalism in the world. Um, I would, I would go to the office after talking to Kate. I'd be like, guys. We have got to do more about human rights abuses at, in the high seas and, and in all these ports because the penalties for the environmental stuff are so low, but the penalties for the human rights abuses are higher. And these, mm-hmm. Let's start working on this in a holistic way. And I remember it was very similar, the deforestation problems for palm oil and pulp and paper, they often went, I mean, of course they're terrible for the environment.

25:28 It's it. Carbon catastrophe. It's a biodiversity catastrophe. I have a beautiful picture of an orangutan mother and baby up on the wall behind me. You know, it's like the number one killer of orangutans is palm oil republic. Yep. It's, you know, they set these huge raging forest fires that you can see from outer space. The smoke like travels to China to the point where the Chinese complain to the Indonesian authorities about air. If China's calling you to complain about air, yeah, about air quality, you're doing something very wrong. Seriously. But it's not just a carbon bomb and an air pollution problem of like airpocalypse now. It's not just killing orangutans and driving immense biodiversity loss.

26:09 Also these fires and this deforestation and pea training, it harmed so many indigenous communities and forest dependent communities. And then, you know, as they would resist, people would be violently mistreated. Threatened. You know, we could see that the human rights problems that go hand in hand with the deforestation on, on land as they do at sea. So I believe that, you know, it's the two sides of the same coin. And I see it again now in coffee where you've got kids and slaves and forced labor and extreme poverty on the social side. And then on the environmental side, deforestation, horrible overuse of chemicals. Often hhp is highly hazardous chemicals. And where do you think they go?

26:50 The ocean. And our bodies. And our rivers. Yeah. And not just that, but plastics from cups and pods, and not just deforestation and plastics and misuse of water and chemicals, but also we're doing things in monocultures that should be beautiful Regenerative agroforestry. So with coffee, as with what I saw when I was at Cream piece and Mighty Earth, environmental and human right stuff go hand in hand. Yeah. If you wanna fix the planet. You gotta do it in this holistic way. Yeah. Now you're, you know, you're trying to help out a, an entire industry. Not just the farmers, not just the people who are affected by this.

27:31 Not just the environment, even the industry, the people who are making profits off of this. Like, let's make profit, but let's do it properly. You, you identify this happening, you know, looking at deforestation through your work and you see coffee. Okay. The coffee industry, who is doing what about it? You're probably looking around and being like, what is being done? You find one paper, and that was written in 2007 by WWF, as you mentioned before. We, we recorded, uh. You know, talking about how deforestation in the, in the coffee industry is, is a huge problem. Not many people are covering this. When did, when did you start to discover this problem? And then when did that turn into the idea and, and sort of brainchild of, of coffee watch?

28:17 So, this is a great question. When I was working at Greenpeace, I already knew that coffee was the number six driver of deforestation. Okay. And a lot of NGOs, Greenpeace, WWF Amnesty, so many NGOs got together and pushed with a lot of parliamentarians to pass this law in the European Union called the EU Deforestation Regulation to bar all of the top seven drivers of deforestation. Gotcha. Makes sense. You could think of it as like the seven deadly sins for forests. Right. Um, and Greenpeace works a lot on the big four. Mm-hmm. But the numbers five, six, and seven got really short rif. So when I went to Mighty Earth after Greenpeace, I worked a lot on cocoa and rubber, which are numbers five and seven of coco deforestation.

29:06 But it was just niggling me and niggling me and niggling me. I wanted to work on coffee. All these scientists kept saying is the number six driver, but then there's no NGOs working on it really. And then I came across one paper. Yeah, which blew my mind. The WWF had investigated how coffee was threatening tiger habitat in Indonesian park, elephant, tiger, and rhino habitat. It's one of the worst. Wouldn't think about that important. National parks and coffee was trying deforestation there. I was like, what is going on? And then I started digging deeper and.

29:48 I realized, oh my God, this is a problem of your portions. I mean, it's not one of the big four, but it's one of the seven deadly worst commodities for horse. Nobody is working on it. Really? WWF did that one beautiful thing and then they never did anything again on coffee and forest. So I decided to start Coffee watch at that time. And then I realized, wow, it's driving deforestation in all the forest frontiers in Cameroon and the whole Great Lakes region. Mm-hmm. And Chicken Z Habitat, bonobo, gorilla Habitat, Andro, these are our closest cousins. Yeah. Yeah. And then one day I was at the beach, uh, with my wonderful husband, um, and I just looked at all these stupid effing coffee cups.

30:38 Mm-hmm. And it was a beautiful beach and I just thought. I hate my life. I started picking up all the coffee cups. I, and it felt like such an act of futility, right? 'cause there's so many of them. As I was going through this garbage picking up episode in Thailand, just sort of like rage cleaning the beach. I thought, wow, it's not just deforestation, it's plastics. Mm. And it wasn't until much later, Andrew, that I processed how many chemicals the coffee industry is using and how much it relies on monoculture. Mm-hmm. So I think my resolve just kept deepening and deepening with every discovery. Yeah. Well, and it seems like it's, it was hitting all the bad parts of affecting the environment at every point in the supply chain.

31:26 So you, you, from the production, like growing to the production aspect, uh, to the retail aspect. And then to the consumer aspect, it was hitting everything, not only from deforestation, but looking at lack of biodiversity with the monocultures, the use of pesticides and, and chemicals to grow the coffee, the packaging to sell the coffee. Then you got, you know, the packaging to sell and consume the coffee, and then it goes into the, to the environment, whether it be on land or at sea or in a river, or all of the, all of the above. Yes. It's, it's, it must've been devastating for you to, as you start to realize where this is at and, and you know, you're, you're one person or a few people who are, who are starting to recognize this and, and, and be aware of this.

32:11 Even though this has been happening for a while, not many people are, were working on these types of problems. Maybe as a, a larger aspect. 'cause we've known coffee cups. I know here in Canada we've known coffee cups have been a problem, you know, out. When people, you see them over, like people throw them out, but they don't always make it to the trash. They'll, they'll, you'll see them on the streets sometimes. You'll see them in the, in the lakes here. And sometimes, and, and obviously not good, uh, in, in a long, in a lot of that way. Um, but when it's, it's kind of interesting when you think of coffee itself. Like I, I, I'm not a coffee drinker, but I don't know anybody who's like, oh, it's so bad that I'm drinking coffee. It's so bad for the environment though. Like, you know, like, you'll see that with like pop or soda, right?

32:55 Yeah. And you'll see that with alcohol. 'cause you know, alcohol has its known effects. Uh, but with coffee, it's like every time someone's drinking, it's like a relief. You know? It's like you're getting that caffeine hit. Uh, if you drink coffee, like there are, there are, uh, studies that show that it's healthy for you if you drink it in moderation. And when you think about the production and the sale, I guess from, from my, I'm, I'm, this is very anecdotal. I always think of people buying it fair trade. I always think about people buying it where, you know, the, the, the, the agriculture aspect, the farmers benefiting because it's part of this fair trade, fair use type of system. And most people want that because that tends to be the better coffee anyway.

33:37 It's, a lot of people are using their coffee, like they drink their wine. It's gotta be unique. They want to taste everything about it, you know, all the way from grinding it all down and, and, and then drinking it. Why is there such this disparity of information of the, what, everything I talked about in terms of the, the creation and the production of this to the selling to the consumer. Not really realizing the, the amount of problems that are occurring. Not just because of one individual doing it, but because of it. Whole industry supplying these individuals with. You know, great coffee Andrew. I think that there has been a giant consumer fraud.

34:20 Mm. Perpetrated on coffee drinkers, both by the industry and by certification schemes. Actually. Interesting. I was shocked. Yeah. When I started Coffee Watch and I started digging into the certification schemes to discover that there is not a single certification scheme, not one that guarantees a living income price for coffee farmers or a living income wage for farm workers. There are 25 million coffee farmers in the world and a hundred million farm workers, give or take. So if you add in their dependence, there's like several kids, right?

35:01 Per farmer and farm worker, we're talking about, well north of 200 million people. Almost all of whom live in poverty, most of whom live in extreme poverty. Right. With coffee. Right. And actually the certification schemes are not fixing it. Most of the certification schemes do not require that you be chemical free, like organic. And to my knowledge, the certification schemes do not force the companies whose coffee they certify to deal with packaging in an appropriate fashion. Even though we know that there are an estimated 500 billion disposable cups used annually, many of which are for coffee.

35:49 Yeah. That's million. With a bee. With a bee. And even though we also know that we think there are hundreds of millions of pods. Yeah. Oh yeah, none of which are compostable and recyclable being appropriately disposed of. I mean, unless you think disposing of it in our ocean is appropriate, and most certifications don't really require the coffee to be grown in a serious agroforestry system.

36:31 There's a difference between monoculture and agroforestry, okay. Right. And if you're gonna have a chemical free agroforestry system that's like a regenerative system with lots of trees mixed in with the coffee, you want multiple different canopy heights. You wanna have native species and not invasives. You want it to be bird friendly and bat friendly and butterfly friendly. And you know, if you do agroforestry coffee, it's got 19 times more biodiversity and double the carbon. It anchors rainfall. It's not a poison machine. It means you're just taking pressure off the oceans. Why is it that the certification schemes don't require coffee to treat? Its effluence. The coffee industry just dumps effluence straight into rivers.

37:15 That's it. There's like. A handful of companies that treat their effluence, not even a hundred percent. The ones that do are like, I treat 80% of your effluence. And I'm like, yeah, that's like a, that's a flex B. So when you think about how like half of global coffee is certified, yeah, but the certification schemes do not play a living income price. Do not deal with packaging to stop everything from winding up in our oceans or horrible landfills do not deal with chemical overuse and misuse and effluent treatment. Do not require really good, robust agroforestry systems that work for carbon, for biodiversity, for farmer food security, for farmer income diversification.

37:59 You realize it's like this giant consumer fraud. That's why huge, most perfectly nice people think they're drinking something good. And they're doing their best, and then they'd be shocked to learn what it really is doing. It's, it's unreal how they can get away with putting these certifications together. Now, I get, you know, when you initially put a certification together, it may not be the best, it may not be the best version of itself. Like when I first started my podcast, my first episode sucked. Like, compared to how I feel about it now, you know, 1700 or almost 1800 episodes later, when you put a certification in place of an industry that's probably not very well regulated because it's working in so many different countries, especially in countries where regulation is probably not the focus, um, in, in developing countries and and so forth.

38:52 And you can get away with paying people at a very, very, very low wage if you know, a, a livable wage at all. As you mentioned, many of them are underneath. And so I, I can understand when you first put a certification in and it doesn't really meet the, the best standards for. The industry for the people growing it, you would expect that it would be improved over time and that, that people would, you know, the people who call it out and say, Hey, you know what, I, I, it's not that I want this to go away. It is, I want this to get better and I wanna work with you to get better. So from a, from a coffee wash standpoint, your organization, when you look at certifications like this, do you approach the cer the certification companies or the, the, the third party bodies who manage these certification, uh, organizations and then say, let's, you know, this is, this is under serving.

39:42 You're not serving the community well, how can we make this better? Do you end up, you know, putting a little bit of pressure on them from a, an activism standpoint, but also we wanna work with you to increase these certifications and make them better? I absolutely believe that the certifications could do better and should do better, and. My dream world is one where I wake up tomorrow or the day after your podcast comes out and all the main certifications and coffee have said, oh wow, we're going to pay living income price and stop dumping hazardous chemicals and coffee and treat all our affluent and make sure that all the coffee is packaged and compostable and recyclable materials and like, where's the no deforestation pledge for me to sign?

40:31 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's my dream. That's my dream. Um, sadly, we're not there yet. Um, right. I certainly have tried, um, communicating with a number of the coffee certifications, schemes us have other organizations, and just recently, um, coffee Watch worked with mm-hmm. Which is a Brazilian organization that's won many, many awards and their director just won the Goldman award recently. Right. Just like the. Green Nobel Prize, I guess you could say. Um, and we worked with this other NGO in Colombia as well to do an investigation of, um, coffee in Colombia.

41:11 Literally we found abuses in the certification schemes of fair trade, of reinforced alliance of four C, which is like one of the biggest in coffee. Yeah. Mostly for Nestle and cafe practices, which is like a hundred percent for Starbucks. Um, we just did that report, but already Coffee watch's first report on, on abuses that we found in Chinese coffee supply chains. A lot of that was certified. Did another report on abuses in Mexican coffee supply chains. A lot of that was certified.

41:53 Um, cafe practices like is almost all of Starbucks coffees. Certified by this thing called Cafe Practices, which was set up mm-hmm. By Conservation International. I'm sure you know of them. They do a lot of ocean work, so you've probably across them. Yeah. Well they certify, um, Starbucks coffee, and not only do they certify all the environmental abuses we were talking about, um, we also filed some, a, a strategic litigation against, uh, coffee companies in the United States. Um, we filed against Starbucks, Nestle, Dunkin Donuts, McDonald's, and a couple others for slavery in their coffee.

42:34 Wow. And some of that was certified coffee. So just to give you a sense of like how bad it is, um, the Brazilian Labor Inspection Department found 3,700 slaves in coffee plantations. Between 1996 and 2003, and that's each of them, they only inspected 0.1% of coffee farm. Yeah. So they're just scratch, literally scratching the surface. They're just scratching the surface. So we are talking about certified slavery. Yeah. As well as certified deforestation and forced labor and child labor and hazardous.

43:19 Well, it's, it's really interesting because you're talking about these major companies, like these major corporations, you know, Starbucks, McDonald's, and so forth, and. I know with the seafood industry, to use this as an analogy, the, one of the biggest problems with the seafood industry is not knowing the supply chain from catching all the way up to the final retail. And there was, Oceania made some interesting discoveries, uh, scary discoveries really. Whereas, like a lot of the, the seafood that was sold in seafood markets a number of years ago, I think it was just around 2018. 2019, 50% of them were not the seafood that they were selling at. And then it wasn't necessarily the, uh, the markets that knew about it.

44:01 It was the fact that they, throughout the, the, the supply chain things changed and they didn't know how it changed, so it wasn't being certified. So you have, um, you know, MSC, the Marine Stewardship Council who have come out and they said that we've actually been able to inspect and we follow, I think it was over 400 different supply chains. I know they, they sometimes identify problems even still within that, but at least they know where this fish is coming from and where the seafood's coming from. Was that the problem when you, when you started bringing lawsuits against these corporations is they just didn't know or didn't have control over the entire supply chain going from the grow, the grow up to the, um, uh, the final sale at, at a McDonald's or at a Starbucks or wherever.

44:49 Was that the, that the actual problem? Do you know those little three monkeys that everyone has on their desk that says like, see no evil? Yes. Speak no evil. Yes. Yeah. If you don't know Yeah. What your supply chain is, is that because you can't know or because you don't want to know? This is really important question. That's the question, right? Yeah. The answer matters hugely for sure. And I personally believe that if you are buying coffee. You must know Yeah. Where your coffee's coming from. And if you cannot figure that out, you should not be in the business of selling coffee.

45:32 Right. You know, it's like if I was gonna sell you a can of tuna fish, I should be able to guarantee A, that it's tuna fish B, that it doesn't have a resty nail in it. See, it doesn't have salmonella. Yeah. It wasn't made by slaves. Right. And it's the same with coffee. Yeah. You know, I think that we have created a system, which completely broken, Andrew, completely broken. Why is it that all these small holder farmers who are so impoverished are not counted as employees of coffee companies? They dance to the tune of those coffee companies. Coffee companies say jump. They say how high? Yeah. Why? Because they have no bargaining power.

46:12 You know, they often live in countries where literally you cannot be in a union. The number two coffee producing country in the world is Vietnam. Like literally. Unions are not legal there. We did our investigation in in China into abuses in Chinese coffee supply chains, but literally unions are not allowed. They're not legal, so can't protect the workers. And that's not even counting the countries where there's so much violent union busting, like Guatemala. Yeah. And Mexico and Brazil where bus and Ed slashed the coffee unions and so many other unions. So you know, if the farmers are basically the slaves or in some cases actually the slaves.

46:58 Yeah, yeah. The coffee industry, I should say farmers and farm workers. Mm-hmm. Why is it that they aren't counted as employees? Why is it that they aren't tabulated? Why aren't you responsible for their healthcare, their pension, their social security, their protective gear? Why don't you have to take responsibility for the eff flu? Why don't you have to take responsibility for the HH ps, the highly hazardous pesticides, which all wind up in the soil and in the water, and in our oceans. Mm-hmm. I just think there's this plausible deniability where the industry has decided we don't want those people to be our employees because then we would be completely responsible for their poverty and their slavery.

47:39 So we're outsourcing it and we're just calling it the free market, you know, so Fair enough. That's the system that we have. Yeah. Now we just have to fix it. We have to ensure that those farmers have rights, that the farm workers have rights, that they're paid a living income. Mm-hmm. That the companies treat their affluence. I think the key is let's make sure that the industry can't say, I don't know. Yeah. I don't care. Yeah. That's not an okay answer. That's like not a viable answer. And, and so that's why, hence the lawsuits being brought to some of the corporations and be like, look, you may not have known. But we don't know if you actually did know and just ignored it, or you just didn't want to know and let it go. But we want you to know, we want you to make it your, uh, your, your first priority to know what is happening at the production site and all the way through, just like McDonald's does with their fish now.

48:28 Like they, they are very proud of it and they, they advertise it a lot that I, I think that's, that's, so, it's an interesting way of doing things. It's like, okay, we're gonna bring these lawsuits. 'cause you need to know that this is wrong and you need to, you need to find out if you're gonna buy and make money off of this. Like a lot of money, especially some of these, these companies who have really focused on creating coffees and cafes and and stuff at other fast food restaurants. And then you're going back to, to be like, okay, now let's start from the beginning and if we were gonna do it prob properly, this is how we would do it. Now if Coffee Watch is coming into this and you want them to do it properly. You know, what's, what's the first step you start at the, the, the site of production?

49:11 Like you start at the farm and, and how do you change an industry that has already taken down a lot of forests that has already made monoculture, um, that has already has, you know, the, the, these, these slaves that are, that are working on these farms. How do you go in and change that culture? 'cause I can't imagine that these are corporations in charge of this. This is probably a lot of. Let's just say nasty individuals and companies that are, that are in charge of this, that are not willing to play by the rules. Well, so Andrew, you know, it's really interesting to think about what has worked in the past. Mm-hmm. In other industries. So you talked about slavery in seafood, which I used to work on more back in the day when I, a green piece.

49:54 You know, you look at how major supermarkets like Walmart got so super involved. Yeah. You talked about how McDonald's got so super involved. Well, guess what? Around 60% of global coffee is bought in supermarkets. Yeah, true Supermarkets figured it out for seafood. I'm sure they can figure it out for coffee. Yeah. McDonald's is one of the top coffee servers in the world. Yeah. You know, I bet. I think that just as. The industry that uses palm oil, which includes like, you know, people who do shampoo and cosmetics and cup of noodles and cookies and, um, detergent and lipstick and all these companies that, that, that use palm oil change everything. Yeah. 50% of what you leave the supermarket with is palm oil in it.

50:37 A lot of companies like Unilever, et cetera, they figured out how are we gonna get completely traceable palm oil? How are we gonna get deforestation free palm oil? You know, we saw deforestation for palm oil has gone down in a lot of places. We know that forced labor in palm oil with really curbed. Right. We know that seafood, slavery, a lot of companies have stepped up and done immense amounts of stuff to fix it. We know companies have done this kind of work before and they can do it again. These are adjacent industries. Maybe one of the closest adjacent industries is cocoa. Yeah. But you know, there are good models for going deforestation free.

51:17 There are great models for going traceable. We know exactly how to do deforestation free and traceable coffee today. Just like actually there are compostable pods. Yeah, there are compostable pods, you know. Um. There are billions of single use aluminum and plastic capsules that have gone to landfills and oceans, um, over time. But now there's compostable pods. Let's you know, we and, and not from some MoMA wearing hippie dippy corner shop run by a mom and pop. No, Nespresso ne especially. That's a major company. Yeah. It's like owned by Nestle. Right? Nespresso. Nestle owned Nesto. It's the world's biggest coffee company. 20% of Global Coffee Nest Nestle.

51:59 So, okay. We know that we can do compostable pos, we know we can do cups for coffee that are not lined with plastic. They're made out of recycled paper and not virgin paper, and that don't go into the oceans. We know how to fix the cups. We know how to fix the pots. We know how to do deforestation free. We know how to do traceable. We even know how to think about rolling out a living income in coffee because the cocoa industry has made so many strides in thinking through how to deliver a living income to cocoa farmers who've been right to also very impoverished, um, in horrible conditions.

52:39 Much like much like coffee. So the good news, the bad news is things are bad. The good news is there's so many solutions mm-hmm. Where they're at the tip of our fingers, and sometimes they're even deployed by the same exact companies. That are very present in coffee, that are also super present in seafood or coffee and cocoa or coffee and soy or coffee. So there, there are multiple different models of making things more sustainable and making things more equitable. Correct. Uh, and and yeah. And, and more environmentally friendly. Correct. That's really, that's really interesting. Now for, for, uh, for people who drink coffee, you know, they're probably listening to this being like, oh my gosh.

53:20 Like, how do I know if my coffee falls within one of these bad category areas? Or if my coffee is, is good. You know, how, how does one figure that out? Like if, you know, even if it has a certification on there, you're like, is this certification real? It's a lot of work for someone who just wants to have a cup of coffee. So how do, how do coffee consumers figure this out? Well, I have good news and bad news for coffee. Okay. So let's get the bad news out of the way first and then focus on the good. If you drink coffee regularly, you almost certainly are drinking slavery, child labor, deforestation, and ocean destruction.

54:00 I'm sorry, but I think it's mm-hmm. That's a hard pill to swallow. That's just the truth. Yeah. Your coffee is killing jaguars and whales, however, instead of sitting there and like sobbing your eyes out mm-hmm. Or going into some doom scrolling, downward spiral of despair, you should think about yourself as a powerful, beautiful, change agent. Mm. Don't sit there and self flatly because you've been unwittingly complicit in horrible abuses of people in planet. No focus on all the great things that you can do now.

54:44 Mm-hmm. That's what matters. Because I think also just as I, sorry to interrupt, but just also too, I think I, I think there's people who feel bad that this happens. Like, oh, what do I do? And people who wanna do it, and then there's other people who are gonna argue against it. No, this certification's, you know, like how you, you always hear that with an argument when somebody says, reveal something to you. I see this in, in, in oceans all the time when we say something, oh, this is actually bad, or Climate change is doing this, they'll argue against it almost as a defense mechanism to say, no, I'm not doing anything bad. It's not like, I think the, the big thing to say, and I always tell my eyes, it's not necessarily your fault that you're drinking coffee and you're contributing to this by drinking coffee.

55:27 I don't want people to say, and, and I'm sure you're the same way, is that this is your fault. The, the, the, the reality of it is just the way the industry is built. We are bringing you information to say, Hey, there's a lot of flaws in this industry, and it can, it can get better. So here's how we work it to do better. Right. Is that That's correct. I think that's absolutely correct. So I would say, you know, if your first stage and hearing all this is denial, like, oh, this woman is crazy, right? Please go visit coffee Watch. You can read all her reports. I am telling you the absolute honest to God truth. Mm-hmm. This data-driven, this is not a joke. I do not come from like rando weirdo groups.

56:08 I've worked at some of the world's top environmental human rights organizations. Yeah, for sure. I graduated from Yale Law School. Everything we do gets a liable and a defamation check. I promise. I'm telling you the truth. Yeah. It comes from denial to anger. You feel angry about this. Okay, that's fine. Don't feel angry at yourself. Right. Don't feel angry at the past. Right. Let's move through that. Maybe the next stage is bargaining. Oh, well I drink certified coffee. How bad can it be? Mm. Actually bad. Right? Let's be ready. Bad. Let's move through. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance to action. You know. You drink coffee every day, that means you can change the world every day and make it a better place every day.

56:52 Ah, I like that. Okay. Coffee can absolutely be a vehicle for saving the planet and making people's lives better. Mm-hmm. And just think about it this way. You can break it down into little steps, and you can start working your way through these habits first. Don't ever get a disposable cup. Just don't do it right either. Don't drink that coffee or plunk your little butt down on a chair and sit down and drink it right there for two or three minutes. It'll be nice. You can talk to someone. You can like make a friend or bring your uncle, bring a reusable mug, or, or whatever other ones do. Yeah. Yeah. PO pods.

57:32 Never get a pod that is just gonna wind up in our oceans. Don't do that. Mm-hmm. Please don't do that. If you love whales, don't do it. Yeah. Don't. Don't get a compost of a one or, again, skip it. How important can it be to you? Just know that if you do the wrong thing, you're voting to put it in a seal's tummy, and if you do the right thing, you're saving the planet. Hmm. That's a powerful thing. You just made the planet a better place. You paid for something really good. Right, right. Another organic chemicals, they're all connected, are what goes into our bodies. What goes into the soil, what goes into rivers, what goes into oceans. Coffee is a very HHP thirsty crop, uses a lot of highly hazardous pesticides.

58:15 Don't do that. Please don't do that either. You can buy organic coffee, which is really chemical free. Rainforest Alliance is like maybe a B minus, and Fairtrade is like a b plus on chemicals. Okay, so those are not perfect, but they're better than nothing. They're better. Yep. Or you can just take a picture of yourself with your coffee cup and tweet or Facebook or Insta or whatever the company and say, I am your loyal customer. I wish you made organic. Or just ask at the counter. Ask at the restaurant. Ask at the cafe. Almost every chain has one organic option. Just try that. Yep. That's something you can do. If you can buy coffee that pays a living income, please do that.

59:00 You don't have to do it every time. You don't have to do it when you're late or rushing or on the go, but stock up on that. Make a habit of it. There is coffee that pays a living income. How do you know? How do you know which one? Like which brands? Check, check, check every time. Okay. When you're buying, check if, if they do it, they will say they do it. Google Living Income, call me. So it's not just like on a certification. It says we provide livable wages for no certification. No certification. It just says on the package we provide livable wages for our farmers. That's correct. And farm workers. Okay. And, and most of the companies that do that tend to be smaller, mid-size, so they don't serve every geography. So depending on whether, whether you Canada or the US or Europe or Japan or Korea, it'll be different. Yeah.

59:40 Might. And it might be a little harder to get than your regular grocery store. You might have to order it online or something like that. So order it online and just make a plan Every month I'm gonna order one bag, two bags. Yeah. Every week, depending on how much coffee you drink. Gotcha. That's a huge thing. Or if you can't do that, you can donate money to a charity that works with coffee farmers. So if you're gonna impoverish them by buying low cost coffee, you can give back to their communities. Right. For Christmas. Yeah. Or you can give this a Christmas present to all the coffee lovers in your life. Yeah. And I would say if you are someone who cares enough to just ask the barista, the manager, the waiter, the Metre D Ask, please ask.

1:00:27 Because every time you ask the, that filters up all the way eventually to the C-suite. And the same goes with social media. Go on their social media. And just tag them and say, please do better if you want. You can go on our Coffee Watch website. We have a place where you can take lots of actions. You can sign every good petition that's out there for sustainable coffee. Mm-hmm. Petitions. It takes you one minute to click all those petitions, but that's a really big difference. We have a list of the films that you can watch. You can screen them with your friends who are coffee drinkers. Mm-hmm. Just spreading the word with five or 10 other humans on planet Earth is a powerful thing.

1:01:08 Hosting a screening, that's like a more fun way of doing it than sitting down and watching someone like me telling you sad, bad news. Maybe your friends are more into films. Yeah. That's a great way to go. The petitions. Buying from the heart, sending messages on social media. Mm-hmm. Posting screenings, asking in your coffee shop. All those things are powerful, and if you live in a democracy like Canada or the US or Europe, then please contact your lawmaker just once a year and ask them to do something. There are laws on the books that have been proposed that would totally clean up global coffee.

1:01:50 Yeah. Sometimes it's a matter of like making up a big stink about it to Yeah. Yeah. Make sure our government representatives are like, oh, this is an important aspect to, to our people. Here's a great example. Germany has this sustainable supply chain law called the Lefa Cat and Gazettes. There wasn't enough popular support for it, and although many people in Poles said that they loved it, a lot of really vocal negative industry captured the ear of the new chancellor. He said he wants to cancel the law. You know, people power matters. If you're in a democracy, you can pass laws and you can protect laws. Yeah, yeah. And laws are a game changer. We have a law in the books in Europe called the EUDR one in the UK called the UK DR in German, in Germany, they have that supply chain law.

1:02:34 And Canada, there's some good laws in the US We have the Forest Act that got bipartisan support in the house and the Senate. There are laws, you can, you are not in North Korea. Right. If you're listening to this podcast, you're definitely not living in Exactly. And probably you're not living in Russia or China and that you are free. That's amazing. You're effing free. Yeah. Yeah. It's a democracy. If you drink coffee every day, I just ask you that once in your life or once a year, you do something for good lives to change global coffee. And if that's all you ever do, yeah. That would still be amazing. Yeah. That would make you a hero for sustainable coffee. Perfect. I love the, I love the call to action because I think this is important.

1:03:16 I think, I think coffee lovers, every time I, I, you know, my wife's a coffee lover, she always wants to do better. You know, my kids love their coffee, they wanna do better. Everybody that I know, they love their coffee, they love their specific coffee, and they wanna do better for the people who are growing the coffee for them. And I think this is, this is important, um, to, to be able to get out and, and, you know, it's, it's really interesting how, you know, at first if I told people, yeah, I have someone from coffee watch on, you know, I have a telephone coffee watch, and they're like. What, how does that have to affect the oceans? Well, it does affect the oceans 'cause the entire supply chain, when you think about it, plastic ends up in the oceans. You have the cups, you have, you know, the, the, um, the little containers, the pods, they end up in the ocean.

1:03:56 The chemicals end up in the ocean from that. And it hurts. It harms wildlife and our wild systems, whether it be on land, in fresh water or in the marine realm, uh, it always, it always makes a difference. So, tell, I wanna thank you for, for bringing this to our attention. Really do appreciate it. I'd love to have you back on to get updates on, on where we are in the industry. Um, but also, you know, if people want to get a hold of your, go to your website, can you just let people know what the, that website is? Yeah, absolutely. Please come to our website. That's where you can find all those wonderful petitions and things like that. It's just coffee watch.org. Awesome. And there is a a, and I'll put the other link to it as well.

1:04:36 There is a, a link on there. Right at the top it says actions, and that's where you can sign the petitions, you can volunteer, you can host screenings, and then you can understand how to buy more, uh, why more responsible coffee? So again, thank you so much, Atel. We really appreciate it. I'm, I'm so happy to have shared this time with you. I'm so thrilled to appear with you here, and I just think that, you know, I wanna leave people with a feeling of immense hope and beauty and that there's so much possibility for change. Yes. And I think we've seen it before and we can do it again. Absolutely. Wonderful. Stay on the line and we'll, uh, we'll chat soon. And thank you so much. We really appreciate.

1:05:17 Thank you Itel for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. It was great to have you on. It was great to be able to find out all about this industry, a lot of stuff. I had no idea what was going on from modern slavery to monocultures and loss of biodiversity to deforestation being one of the top seven triggers of deforestation or reasons for deforestation. It's unreal. I can't believe that's even a thing, but if you think about how many people, you know, drink coffee and how popular it is and what the best way to go and how to find out which is the best coffee company or coffee brand or type of coffee to go with is a really difficult thing to do just like it is for seafood. And it just kind of goes to show that it can happen in any industry and then having that site from grow to consumption for companies to be able to see that whole supply chain is really, really important.

1:06:02 So it's nice to see somebody like Atel and her staff of Coffee watch be able to work within this industry, even though it's not an industry that has a lot of attention to it, which is. Boggles boggles my mind when she first started. People weren't really paying attention to it. So I'm glad somebody is, and I'm glad there are more and more people who are doing so now. And so if you want to go to find out more about how to, you know, drink coffee better, Astel mentioned, go to coffee watch.org, all one word, coffee watch.org. And if you want to take action, I'll put the link in the show notes. You just have to go on the top menu bar. Over to the far right by the donate button, so you can donate as well. But right by the donate button, there's a list of actions that you can do. You can volunteer, you can assign petitions, and you can find out how to buy more responsible coffee, and of course, host screenings for coffee type documentaries.

1:06:50 So thank you so much for joining us, Atel. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the podcast, because this is something that we always wanna learn. We'll learn new things, learn how things affect the ocean, learn how things affect the planet. The deforestation is a huge trigger for planetary disaster. As well as plastic pollution in the ocean. So it's always great to be able to find out more ways that we can find solutions in a industry that would make a big difference. 'cause there's so many people that drink coffee and making better choices can make huge differences. So I want to thank Itel for joining us. If you have any questions or comments, please lay them in the comments below. You're watching this on YouTube, and of course, if you're watching this on your favorite podcast app, which is the audio version, you can get ahold of me.

1:07:31 Going to speak up for blue.com/contact. Fill out the form, send me an email. You can also go to at How to Protect the Ocean on Instagram that's at How to Protect the Ocean. Send me a dm. Love to hear from you. Other than that, thank you for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the True nor Strong and free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.