The majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from the firm's coffee shops. It has promised that by 2010, 50% of the electricity used in-store will come from renewable sources and energy use will have been reduced by 25% compared with today's levels - among a series of measures.
Starbucks' coffee purchasing practices have been criticised by NGOs Read more
Frank Marquardt joins GreenBiz Radio today to help us try to answer these questions. Frank is the author of the new Green Careers Insider Guide from Wet Feet publications. Available at WetFeet.com, the guide examines the every-growing green marketplace and explores the job opportunities within it.
Tilde Herrera: Hi, Frank. Welcome to GreenBiz Radio.
Frank Marquardt: Thank Read more
"On July 5th people around the world will show Starbucks that we, baristas Read more
Scott has spent nearly his entire adult life working at the retail behemoth, with a mandate to increase sales and profits and keep costs as low as possible. Rice, after graduating from Yale University in 1983, spent 11 years working with peasant coffee farmers in Nicaragua trying to squeeze higher prices out of coffee buyers. He set up one of the first cooperatives, with 24 coffee-growing families, who sold their first batch of fair trade Read more
Starbucks shares, which have been falling steadily for nearly two years, jumped 72 Read more
This is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's new environmental history, Born Under a Bad Sky, now available from AK Press / CounterPunch Books.
The place is in Honduras, a so-called free-trade zone or maquiladora-little more than a ragged swath hacked out of the rainforest and ringed by a tall fence, tipped with razor-sharp wire. Inside a clump of factories produce cut-rate apparel for American companies. Armed guards, many of them veterans of the Honduran defense forces (
Read moreNo longer does Jennifer Stelly push a metal shopping cart down supermarket aisles. Instead, she carries a reusable bag to pick out produce - all grown organically by local farmers - in the three rows at the Central City Co-Op in Montrose.
"Generally speaking, I absolutely refuse to shop at Wal-Mart and I always try to go just as local as possible. ... I try to stay away from corporate America as much as possible," said Stelly, who quit her engineering job four years ago to open an energy-medicine business.
Stelly said she prefers family-owned businesses to chain stores. She
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