Coffee Sankey Diagram

After all these Sankey diagrams for energy flows, flows of carbon, phosphorus, and the like here is a special one for all those of you, who are coffee addicts – like me. Saman Zomorodi on his blog ‘Saman’s System, Sites and Buildings’ features a coffee flow Sankey diagram in this post.

This is an infographic for global coffee production. Producers are on the left side, coffee consumers are on the right. The dark brown flows are for developing nations, while the milk coffee color ones are for developed nations. No quantities given in the diagram, so we don’t learn the actual absolute figures.

However, “this allows the reader to actually see where coffee is being made and how far it actually travels to another world region. As evident in the diagram, almost all coffee is produced in the developing nations, while the majority of it is consumed in the developed nations. This relationship underscores the unproportional amount the developed world consumes, while the developing nations have to pay many hidden costs.”

The original image is >2MB and I had to resize it with a loss in quality. Visit Saman’s blog to download a highres version of the diagram.