Not everyone who wants to signify their individuality by consuming a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources can afford an SUV. For the rest of us, there is coffee.

Usually served in grotesquely large cups, generally embarrassingly expensive, and often a token of the consumer’s income and demographic, the frothy, sweet stuff with exotic brand names is the perfect accessory for a lifestyle built around narcissism.

And of course, there is scarcely an SUV in the land without a venti frappuccino in the cup holder.

It’s disappointing that something that tastes so good should leave such a bitter taste in our mouths. But it’s hard to get around the facts. And since coffee is the second-most traded commodity in the world (after oil), with contracts valued at about $140 billion each year, the impact of each cup of coffee is multiplied enormously. Four hundred billion cups of the stuff are downed each year.

It’s difficult to know where to begin. How about water? It takes about 140 litres of water to produce a single cup of coffee. In a world of dwindling water reserves, this alone is difficult to swallow.

How about the conditions the workers endure? Sure, there is such a thing as Fair Trade coffee, and the market for it has grown 265 percent since 2002. No doubt this trade network brings real benefits to farmers and their families. But it makes up less than one percent of global coffee sales (though some shops, like the UK’s Cafedirect, use only Fairtrade coffee; Starbucks, by contrast, is less than four percent Fairtrade). And it adds only a few cents per pound for the farmers.

This hardly seems fair, when a coffee shop can squeeze more than 50 espressos out of a pound of coffee.

How about the environmental impacts? In areas where coffee is grown in full sun, farmers use about 30 kg of artificial nitrogen fertilizer per hectare. And while there is so much fuss about “shade-grown” coffee that you’d be excused for assuming that all coffee is grown in the shade, the fact is that in Columbia, for example, 86 percent is grown in the sun. Growing coffee in the sun increases crop yields, but leads to soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and growing dependence on chemical inputs.

Then there are the climate effects. Each kg of coffee results in over 8 kg of CO2 by the time it’s consumed.

Add in the millions of trees cut down to make paper cups (which further contribute to climate change), the environmental impact of the sugar and milk that go into your latte (sugar is deemed by the WWF to be the agricultural product with the biggest environmental impact, and dairy isn’t exactly green either), and your coffee is suddenly not tasting so sweet.

True, coffee is not uniquely damaging to the environment. Beef, soft drinks, cheese and many other things have environmental footprints we’d rather not think about (to say nothing of big cars, big houses, big budgets). And no one is going to give up coffee immediately after discovering its hidden costs.

But it gives a good sense of how the small things we do and buy add up to an enormous footprint, which we’re going to have to sort out sooner or later.