How many calories to produce a 1-calorie can of coke?

As a child, I had an older couple next door that acted as adopted Grandparents, Helen and Jim.  Helen and Jim let me play on their piano, watch Sesame Street on their TV, took me to my first ballet, and treated me to my first Chinese meal where I was charmed by the red walls, the velvet curtains, the gold filigree, the pink sauce, the chopstick mayham, and of course the animal calendar.

Jim was a minister, varnished trash cans w charming images he cut out from magazines, and had a sweet sense of humor.  He used to ask me questions like:  if Ivory soap is 99.44% pure, what is the remaining 0.56%?  One time, at the Chinese buffet, when the waitress asked him for his drink order, he said:  I’d like something w no calories, no artificial coloring, no artificial flavoring, and no caffeine – Can you do that for me?  The waitress looked at him quizzically.  He meant he wanted a glass of tap water.

In 2003, I was in the position of hiring some undergraduates to work on a life-cycle analysis project with me.  By that time, I had become obsessed with where things came from and where they went.  Think about it, choose one thing on your table and try to follow all the steps back in its creation?  A pencil, for example.  Think of the package it came in.  The receipt you got at the register and the metals that made the register.  And what about the electricity in the shop, and the mining of the coal to light and cool the store.  What did the clerk eat for breakfast that morning – Where were the eggs laid and what was the egg carton made from.  What about the tractor trailer that brought the pencils to the store? and the tires that wore down on the highway getting pencils, in general, across America.  When the truckdriver stopped to load up w diesel, what bag of chips did he pick up and where was the phosphorus mined that fed the corn (or potatoes) that made those chips?  As you can see, I haven’t even gotten to the construction of the graphite, the harvest of the tree, the paint for the surface, the processing of the tin that holds the eraser, or the material basis of the eraser.

Now take that simple pencil example and extrapolate all the human cooperation and natural resources to bring you all the things on your desk.  It’s mind boggling.  Walk outside and take in all the things you don’t own, or that we as a society own collectively.  And for me, it fills me w tremendous gratitude.  Gratitude for all those that worked together and also gratitude for the land base that generated it.  It also gives me anxiety, bc I know there is inequity, injustice, and a limit to our natural resource base.

So, here I am interviewing smart Cornell undergraduates.  Yes we asked normal questions, but the question I wanted to know How they answered was this:  How many calories does it take to produce a can of 1-calorie Coke (and why). The choices were:  1-500 calories, 500-1500 calories, or >1500 calories.

I wanted to see the range with which the students thought.

The key word in the sentence is actually ‘can’.  Making an aluminum can from bauxite uses tremendous amounts of energy.  Some reports say 1600 calories for just the can alone.  Say nothing of the shipping, advertising, processing of the water, the carbonation, the creation of color, synthesis of caffeine and taste, etc.

The conceptual point here is simply that our lives are based on calories.  Calories we eat, and calories we don’t eat.  The pragmatic import here is, if you are only going to recycle one thing, let it be your aluminum!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling.  A recycled aluminum can uses 5% of the energy a brand new can uses (making this life cycle analysis more complicated).

Those points aside, what is sustainable packaging? and what exactly is the logic of a 1-calorie coke?  From an energy use standpoint (the 1969 slogan “It’s the real thing” aside), what organism would use more than 1500 calories to make a 1-calorie beverage that an individual pays a dollar for?  A 1-calorie can of Coke burns the fat of the land.   It might be my definition of futility.