Environmentalists receive a bad rap for being extremely picky about every energy-consuming detail of human life. They ask people to change their eating and transportation habits just to prevent a few tons of carbon dioxide from being released. Granted, this is crucial in the whole “everyone doing their part” affair, but what if I told you one of the biggest culprits out there is hidden in every soft drink, in every barbecue, in every U.S. home. Its name is Ice, and its footprint is labeled “extreme.”
If you’ve ever traveled any where outside the United States you may remember sipping on a warm Coca Cola and if you dared to muster up the courage to ask in a broken foreign tongue for ice to cool the bitter carbonation, two sparingly shaped cubes were gingerly deposited into your beverage. The reason for this is not to punish you for your feeble attempt to produce a simple word with minimal ascendancy. The real reason is that ice is a precious commodity. I’ll admit, this seems like a stupid thing to say because we come from a country where ice is so abundant it is served in any unheated beverage without a second thought. Without any thought, people go out and regularly buy giant bags of it. It is given out for free in king-sized cups simply to entertain our idling teeth with something to grind upon. But ice is very energy intensive, especially in tropical regions of the world where shade doesn’t even exist.
The Chilling Facts
Most home refrigerators come with an automatic ice machine, and all businesses that serve food and or drink have a large automatic ice maker. (This is just to show you that where there is food there is ice.) Auto ice machines (AIM) use on average 4-20 kWh per 100 pounds of ice, the larger the machine the higher the energy efficiency. Hey, it is its one and only job, unlike a home freezer’s, so darn-straight it better be the best of the best. And yes, 100 pounds of ice is a lot of ice. For example, with that much energy you could watch TV for up to 80 hours or use a personal computer for 50 hours!2 An average home in the United States uses about 30 kWh per day,3 thus the average AIM uses half of one home’s energy per 100 pounds of generated ice.
As a personal anecdote, I used to work at a corporate coffee shop where the ice machine was always running and employees were constantly refilling ice buckets for blended and iced coffees. With 2 ice bins that held about 7 buckets (15 liters) of ice, each filled up around 3 times per day, ice weighing 1g per cm cubed4, on average we used nearly 1,400 pounds of ice per day.5
This is quite higher than probably both you and I expected. But after doing the math multiple times, the number remains constant, meaning over thirteen hundred pounds of ice are used in one store in one day. Let’s give corporate coffee a break and assume the store employs an ice machine with supreme energy efficiency (at 4kWh per 100 pounds of ice), since it is a high-yield machine.
The math:
(1,390 pounds) x (4 kWh/ 100 lbs) = 55.6 kWh which is almost enough to run two homes for one whole day!
Government
The United States and Canadian governments know their citizens love their beverages extra chilly but at the same time are attempting this going “green” thing. The compromise in Canada was updating their energy efficient regulations for automatic ice makers as a part of the nation’s Clean Air Regulatory Agenda.6 California followed suit in 2008 limiting the amount of kilo-Watt hours each type of automatic ice machine may use.7 The United States gave incentives for companies that use STAR energy appliances—these puppies can save an average business 1,160 kWh and 2,700 gallons of water per year.8 To see California kWh policy on AIMs see: http://appliancestandards.org/asap_media/doc/icemakers.pdf.
The Cold Hard Facts
I’m not saying don’t eat ice; in this country it is virtually impossible to avoid the crunchy temptation since it is automatically served with any beverage, no questions asked. All this mathematical problem-solving highlights the point that ice is unwelcome in most countries not because they care less about beverage quality but because they care more about saving energy. So give warm orange juice a break and start to enjoy the antipodal experience, after all, whether you are in a foreign country or right at home.
