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The Pacific Ocean Is Polluted With Coffee
An anonymous reader writes in with this excerpt from Inhabitat:"People aren't the only ones getting a jolt from caffeine these days; in a new study published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, scientists found elevated concentrations of caffeine in the Pacific Ocean in areas off the coast of Oregon. With all those coffee drinkers in the Pacific Northwest, it should be no surprise that human waste containing caffeine would ultimately make its way through municipal water systems and out to sea – but how will the presence of caffeine in our oceans affect human health and natural ecosystems?"
if you check closelyy enough,most other waterways are,too
Geek Hillbilly
The fishies will be swimming stupidly faster with more energy!
More like "engergized"?
What do you think we caffeine drinkers should call ourselves?
Caffeinated sushi. *drool*
Neither the summary nor the linked article said the amounts, but they are listed in the original paper. In the ocean, they found 44.7 ng/L. "Caffeine concentrations in rivers and estuaries draining to the coast measured up to 152.2 ng/L." For those who like their numbers in ppm, I believe that's .0447 ppm and .1522 ppm, respectively. Sometimes I fail at math, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
that human coffe/tea consumption and pee will have an effect on the world's oceans.
Other human activities, yes, definitely. But not this.
While this is not surprising and questionably news, I am a little more worried about the years and years of synthetic, biologically active drugs in the water. Birth control hormones don't exactly just disappear after you swallow them, and I know that they and other classes of petroleum based drugs have shown hormonal activity not only in mammals, but amphibians, fish, and birds. Though a world with huge breasted marine mammals would be cool, I am more concerned about the chemicals other than coffee that are following the same pathways and reaching the entire world. Miles deep into the ocean, thousands of miles through the atmosphere, there is really no where on the planet that has not been affected in at least a minor way by the expansion of human industry.
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Wiki says
Caffeine is metabolized in the liver by the cytochrome P450 oxidase enzyme system (to be specific, the 1A2 isozyme) into three metabolic dimethylxanthines. Further, In healthy adults, caffeine's half-life has been measured with a range of results. Some measures get 4.9 hours, and others are at around 6 hours.
Therefore, it seems unlikely that the source of caffeine in the ocean is from human waste, since the time spent in the gut exceeds the half-life of caffeine, and when metabolized, its no longer caffeine. There is of course still some small remaining un-metabolized caffeine in urine. A liter of espresso may contain as much as 2254 milligrams of caffeine. But when filtered through a human gut 5 to 10 milligrams/liter in urine is unusual, and 15mg/l gets you bounced from most sports programs as a sign of abuse.
It seems far more likely that the coffee poured out by restaurants, offices, and households, and the disposed of grounds being used for compost and gardening are a larger source than what comes out in the urine stream. Also the water Decaffeination processes is the source of the excess caffeine in city sewage, even though caffeine thus recovered can be marketed into the soft drink business, not all small operations bother with that.
Quoting the first linked source:
Caffeine occurrence and concentrations in seawater did not correspond with pollution threats from population density and point and non-point sources, but did correspond with storm event occurrence.
So it seems to me that the caffeine is just as likely entirely natural, perhaps produced in very low quantities by some naturally occurring plants in the predominantly coniferous temperate rain forests of the area, rather than by any human activity or byproduct. Such a low production would leach out into streams and rivers during storms, but not from municipal sewers, and hence would not correspond to population density.
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I'd like to swim upstream and spawn, but the last time I tried it, I wound up in Lake Erie! Eww! And MAN is the wind cold at supersonic speeds!
It took me almost a week to swim home! It would have happened faster, but I ran out of caffeine two-days from home. Hawaii was nice though.
Now where was I?
Oh yeah.
WE'RE VERY AWAKE DOWN HERE GUYS!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I think there's a better chance of you being modded "What the fuck are you talking about?"
I know it has a few health benefits, but it's just too bitter.
One benefit is making you think "bitter" is tasty. The second, and more important one, is the prevention of lack-of-coffee headaches.
Translation:
I know I'll probably get modded troll for this but good luck separating [people I'm the opposite of, and hold distain for] in [state below the states being written about] from [place I heard is attached to the object in the issue].
Personally I've never [insert way of using the object in question]. I know it has [something obvious about nearly everything], but [insert something only vaguely related to the object in question].
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Not buying it.
An 8 oz cup of coffee is 236.5 ml and has 49mg of caffeine. Assume the entire thing was thrown away undrunk at all. The population of portland is about 600k. If we assume that everyone in portland throws away one full cup of coffee every day for 100 years and that every drop ends up in the ocean, that's 21.9b cups of coffee or approx 1 billion grams of caffeine.
100 years is plenty of time to diffuse. Its also plenty of times for caffeine to break down but less assume this were magic caffeine and so lasted the 100 years perfectly intact. Since they say the pacific ocean lets say none of it leaves the pacific for the other oceans. The pacific ocean is 7.721473366 × 10^21 liters. So cross multiplying (7.721473366 × 10^21× ) x (.049 g) / (.2365 l) us that that we are 1.6x10^20 grams so your billion grams falls 1.6x10^11 short. OK well lets assume that in addition to not breaking down it also doesn't diffuse. The Pacific is 361.1m kilometers in area. So lets assume that all the coffee hangs out for the entire century in the 2 kilometers nearest Portland, we still are short by 3 full orders of magnitude.
There is no way a bunch of 600k humans use enough coffee for the ocean to notice.
Let's hope nobody dumps a bunch of frickin' lasers in the ocean too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There are chemicals that can kill fish at 3 parts per billion. There are other things like salt that don't bother them as much, but it's really variable.
However, as other people have pointed out, there are lots of other chemicals getting dumped into the water system, including things like cocaine and prozac that have been processed through humans first. With caffeine, humans metabolize it so you wouldn't get much left, but there's all the caffeine in coffee grounds and waste coffee and soda.
And it is Portland.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Surely the elevated levels of caffeine in the ocean .... must be a wake-up call!
First, you're off by a factor of thousand, so it'd really be sixty thousand tons, not sixty million tons.
Second -- this was the higherst concentration they found, in one small area of the ocean -- they are *not* saying the entire ocean has that much coffeine in it, indeed they sampled other places and found nothing (i.e. the concentration was below their limit of detection)
WE'RE VERY AWAKE DOWN HERE GUYS!
Just watch out for the sharks with frickin' lasers ON FRICKIN' CAFFEINE!!!
Lemon curry???
Depends on how early in the day they run out of whiskey.
If it's too bitter, then you really haven't had decent coffee yet. You can make strong, flavorful coffee without it having to be bitter. If the coffee you're drinking is bitter, there's a good chance that the preparation methods are at fault, since the bitter flavors tend to get extracted from the grounds as a result of over-extraction (the good flavors are extracted first, with the bitter ones coming later).
For instance, if it's being made in a percolator or a standard drip coffee maker, you need to find something else. Both of those cause some of the grounds to be over-extracted of their flavors, resulting in excessive bitterness. Proper coffee preparation involves water being evenly distributed among the grounds, enabling them to be uniformly extracted of their flavors in exactly the proper amount, then not a moment more. That's why you see a lot of the good coffee preparation methods involving either pressure (so as to force the water through the grounds) or stirring the grounds into the water (so as to uniformly disperse the grounds), sometimes in combination with one another.
Some basic tips:
1) Avoid coffee from a percolator or typical drip coffee maker.
2) Avoid coffee that's been on a burner for awhile.
3) Avoid coffee that was made with boiling water.
4) Avoid coffee made from grounds that came ground already.
In the end though, find whatever works for you, and if it's not coffee, that's fine. Just give it a fair chance by finding some actual decent stuff. There are plenty of other tips out there, but this will at least get you started. And I'm sure some actual coffee aficionado can point out 10 things I said that were incorrect or that I could have said better.
Nah just dangle a few stale pastries, a couple mac books/ipads/iphones and a wifi access point over the side, and the fish will be leaping into your boat.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't know, passing the bong around congress would probably improve things dramatically.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They say tea contains caffeine and yet I can drink one before bed and not feel any effects of insomnia. The reverse is true if i drink coffee. Are there different types of caffeine or is there a lower concentration in tea?
Tea contains tanin, which blocks the absorption of caffeine. This typically means that you get an immediate caffeine kick from coffee, which then wears off, while tea gives you a slower release of a smaller amount over a period of a few hours. Add to that, after regular consumption you build up a tolerance for caffeine and so won't experience any effects (other than withdrawal if you stop having any), but if you regularly drink tea then you won't be used to the sudden jump in caffeine levels. Oh, and much of the effect of caffeine is psychological. A study a few years ago found that people who unknowingly drink decaf also exhibit the symptoms that they expect from coffee, right up until the point that withdrawal kicks in (and, in some people, the withdrawal is so mild that they don't notice).
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Green tea has less caffeine than black tea, but arguably is much healthier (http://nutritionfacts.org/video/coffee-vs-tea/). Green tea is less processed than black tea, but white tea which is even less processed has less caffeine and may have the most health promoting properties. I've swapped out my daily pot of joe with a daily pot of green/white mix and do feel a lot better! Even with a few chocolate espresso beans now and then, no insomnia :)
While tea does contain tanin so does coffee. A more common reason as to why you can do this is either you're drinking a fruit /mint tea that has little to no caffeine, or more likely, your body is conditioned for coffee so that when you smell coffee and taste it your brain behaves as though it's just waking up even if there's not a lot of caffine in the cup. An example of this was a study (in england around 2011 if my memory serves) that had people drink regular coffee and decaf and then tested focus and reaction time. The people drinking decaf who were told they were drinking caffeine actually did better than the caffeinated people on (I think just on) reaction time.
The brain is an annoyingly inconvenient trickster sometimes.
For many people withdrawal from caffeine means a migraine headache. I've told several coworkers who complained of severe headaches on Mondays that they need to drink the same amount on weekends as they do in the office.
>We closed 16 of our Starbucks that couldn't turn a profit and you'd have to be insane to drink coffee from McDonalds, DD or 7-11 given the other choices.
Insane? Or maybe just not care about having a "premium coffee experience". A lot of people are happy with the coffee at say McDonalds... it's fast, hot, and quite a bit cheaper than coffee from a coffee house. Is it gourmet? No... Is it good? To them it is.
It's just like how many people like Coors Light... they sell a ton of it! Now I personally prefer one of the many fine microbrews in the Pacific Northwest. However my best friend really prefers Coors Light and given the choice between that something locally crafted, she orders a Coors Light (and she's tried a lot of others). I don't like it much myself, but who am I to tell her that she's wrong or insane to like it? Isn't it enough that she likes what she likes and I like something different?
Headache/bad headache != migraine headache. I wish people would really stop saying they get migraine headaches all the time. A migraine head ache is one that is at least 3 days long. Unless your headache was at least that long, it was not a migraine. Also usually migraine sufferers have other issues like not seeing too well, super sensitivity to light, sound, or smell. Could be taste but I never met anyone who had that. They also can vomit or have diarrhea or both at the same time from a migraine. I watched a family member have migraines for years. The many trips to the hospital, and that little pill that messed her up as much as the migraine. When you have a headache where the world is vibrating due to your eye sight being affected from the headache for 3-4 weeks, we'll talk. The one day migraine is BS. That is a headache, not a migraine headache.
Caffeine increases the blood flow. Increase blood flow helps with regular headaches. Not migraines. The doctors had me pumped full of caffeine during one test. I was talking 2-3 times as fast. That tape was funny. Did nothing for the headache I had at the time. For other headaches, caffeine works well. Why do you think Excedrin works well for regular headaches.
Another observation: If you actually do get migraines often, see if something near the head or neck is out of alignment or pinched. Most of the heavy migraine sufferers I know had a pinched nerve, out of alignment neck or jaw. Getting those fixed helped slow the frequency of migraines dramatically. Mine issue was my jaw. A tooth came in that hit my lower jaw. That made my jaw not line up correctly. It was off by just a little. Had the tooth taken out. Now I have a few headaches a year instead of a few weeks of no headaches a year.
They say tea contains caffeine and yet I can drink one before bed and not feel any effects of insomnia. The reverse is true if i drink coffee. Are there different types of caffeine or is there a lower concentration in tea?
Depends on the tea. Some can have higher concentrations, some lower - in the same way that concentration in coffee will vary based on the bean, how it's ground, etc.
Personally - after chugging far too many 2 liter bottles of 'dew in my youth - I find that none of the above particularly effects me. I can drink tea/coffee/jolt/whatever and go to sleep afterwards.
Maybe I should switch to cocaine.
I've seen news of reports on studies lately that show coffee is good for you. Is the green tea thing simply Asian folklore, or have there been scientific studies? The video you linked is suspect; it's a VIDEO. Do you have a link for those of us who can actually read, preferably from an .edu domain rather than a .org?
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Coffee should ONLY be brewed in clean, ceramic crucibles.
Anything else will dissolve in the face of properly brewed coffee.
That's where you get all the bitter stuff, bits of spoon, filter, carafe....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Type of Size* Caffeine**
Black tea 8 oz. (240 mL) 14-61 mg
Black tea, decaffeinated 8 oz. (240 mL) 0-12 mg
Green tea 8 oz. (240 mL) 24-40 mg
AriZona Iced Tea, lemon-flavored 8 oz. (240 mL) 11 mg
Generic brewed Coffee 8 oz. (240 mL) 95-200 mg
Espresso, restaurant-style 1 oz. (30 mL) 40-75 mg
Monster 8 oz. (240 mL) 80 mg
5-Hour Energy 2 oz. (60 mL) 207 mg
Caffeine content for coffee, tea, soda and more
Caffeine is a delicate organic compound, the more you heat the tea or coffee the more you destroy the caffine, such as the green tea having 1.5 - 2 times as much caffeine as the more heavily process green tea; an Espresso has almost the same to half a regular coffee, despite being made from the near same amount of coffee grounds.
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I realize this isn't reddit, but, AMA.
I wasn't involved much in the study design in terms of the sampling methods themselves, but I did the site selection for the portion of our study that ended up published. It's been a few years but I still know it like the back of my hand.
I did all of the sampling itself and a large portion of processing the samples including the GC-MS portion. I was not involved much in the analysis except as a sounding board.
To address some of the concerns brought up thus far:
1) There are no known natural sources of caffeine in Oregon. There exists some coral in the indian ocean that secretes caffeine but nothing here locally, off-shore or terrestrial. Caffeine is not the best example, but, the idea is that it is a marker of human impact. We focused on waste water here because it's the most likely source.
2) Yes, you can accurately measure levels of ng/L. Yes, it's a pain. We actually did about a year of sampling, modifying our procedures, and tests before we were able to confidently prevent and rule out source of contamination. This even included not consuming caffeine in proximity to samples or before doing work with them.
3) I've not yet read the final paper (no uni access any more) but the other portion of the study we did was dosing pacific mussels with caffeine in a controlled environment. We looked at stress proteins, which are formed in response to environmental stressors, most notably heat. We did not observe an effect at the levels we measured in nature.
4) Excretion rate from humans is about 5%. Depending on the wastewater treatment regimen, primarily based on tertiary treatment like carbon filtering (very rare) and residence time, anywhere from 0% to 100% of caffeine can be removed. Further study here is necessary.
5) The half-life of caffeine in the environment is primarily heat related. Based on other studies we referenced, it's much longer in seawater. Off the top of my head the magnitude was on the order of 200 days in seawater vs 60-90 in fresh water. You should read the paper/references for exact numbers. This is far longer than the transit time from excretion to the ocean for most wastewater treatment. It does not bio-accumulate.
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