Which is More Sustainable? Dried Beans vs. Canned Beans
One of my favorite bean recipes - Cabbage and White Bean Soup!
If you've ever stood in a grocery store aisle pondering the sustainability of dried beans vs. canned beans, you're in the right place (and you're my kind of person!). In this article, I outline the sustainability concerns associated with canned beans and dried beans at every step of their lifecycle, from farm to table!
Production
All beans, whether they are canned or dried, start in the same place: a farm. Of course, each farm will have different sustainability concerns depending on its practices. Organic, low-till or polyculture farms are generally more sustainable than conventional monoculture farms. Whether your beans are canned or dried, try to buy from farms with sustainable practices whenever possible.
After the bean plants grow, all beans (dried and canned) are usually left to dry in the field. After they dry, the beans that are going to become dried beans are cleaned, packaged and sent to the store. On the other hand, canned beans are rehydrated, blanched and only then packaged for stores.
The canned beans' rehydrating, blanching, and packaging process is much more energy-intensive than the dry beans' cleaning and packaging process. For this reason, producing dried beans is almost always more sustainable than producing canned beans.
However, keep in mind that the sustainability practices at your beans' farm of origin could tip the scales. If you're comparing conventionally-grown dried beans to organic, polyculture-grown, solar-power-manufactured canned beans, the canned beans would certainly be more sustainable than the dried beans.
Bottom line: Dried beans have a shorter, less energy-intensive and more sustainable production process than canned beans. However, remember that each farm has different sustainability practices that could make your beans more or less sustainable.
Packaging
When considering how sustainable a product's packaging is, we have to consider how the packaging is made, what it is made of and what will happen to it at the end of its life.
Canned beans are usually packaged in aluminum cans, while dried beans are packaged in thin plastic bags. Creating aluminum cans uses much more energy than creating thin plastic bags because aluminum is more heavy-duty and requires smelting. Plastics bags also weigh less than aluminum and therefore use less energy during transportation. So in terms of creation and transportation, plastic baggies win.
However, things get a little trickier when we consider end-of-life sustainability. Aluminum is relatively easy to recycle and is often made from recycled material, while plastic is not easily recyclable and is usually not made from recycled material. Additionally, plastic takes hundreds of years to break down. Even after breaking down, it sticks around to pollute our air and water in the form of microplastics.
So although plastic requires less energy during its lifetime, it could potentially cause more long-term environmental harm. It is difficult to compare the sustainability of these two materials since they are associated with different environmental concerns. Ultimately, this category is a bit of a toss-up.
Bottom line: plastic is easier to make and transport, but aluminum has fewer long-term sustainability concerns. "Pick your poison" is much too applicable.
Transportation
When thinking about transportation, we have to consider how much energy each type of beans requires during transportation and how far the beans are traveling.
Transporting dried beans is almost always more sustainable than transporting canned beans. This is largely because canned beans are a lot heavier than dried beans. Their packaging is heavier, they have absorbed around 1.5 times their weight in water, and they are suspended in even more water. All this weight means they require more energy to transport.
Canned beans also have the potential to use more energy during transport because you can easily grow dried beans in your backyard. Beans that you've grown yourself won't have to travel anywhere, so their transport emissions are zero!
Bottom line: dried beans are lighter to transport and are easier to find locally (or in your own backyard!), making their transportation generally more sustainable than canned beans.
Preparation
Although the sustainability scales seem to lean toward dried beans in terms of production and transportation, the energy required to prepare dried beans at home might be enough to tip the entire scale toward canned beans.
Preparing dried beans at home can require two hours of simmering, which can use up to 11 times the energy per capita as the industrial cooking process! In other words, the process of blanching and packaging beans at an industrial scale is much more efficient than the process of individual home chefs cooking dried beans. These emissions alone are enough to render canned beans generally more sustainable than dried beans.
But there is a major caveat to this — if you have an electric stovetop that runs on renewable energy, dried beans will likely be the most sustainable option. Especially if you can get dried beans packaged in paper or straight from your own backyard, AND rely on renewable energy to cook them, dried beans will be a much more sustainable option.
However, without a renewable-powered stovetop, canned beans are surprisingly the more sustainable option.
Bottom line: cooking canned beans industrially is wayyyy more efficient than cooking dried beans at home, so canned beans are generally the most sustainable option.
Some parting words
In a surprise ending, canned beans are often more sustainable than dried beans. However, although it's fun to debate the sustainability of canned vs. dried beans, we need to remember that this is a fairly trivial debate in the grand scheme of things.
Holding companies accountable for their grossly unsustainable habits and voting for leaders who care about sustainability (and maybe even replacing some of your meat consumption with any bean consumption — dried or canned) are some of the most effective ways to live a more sustainable life!