News
June 5, 2008
Starbucks has pledged to develop a global environmental strategy, decreasing its carbon footprint as it grows, the global coffee company said in its seventh annual corporate social responsibility report, published last month.
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
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
News
July 3, 2008
There's been a lot of discussion lately about green collar jobs and the impact they could have on the U.S. economy. So what exactly is a green job, and what do you have to do to get one?
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
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
News
June 4, 2008
Equal Exchange is a worker-owned cooperative established in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1986 dedicated to fair trade with small-scale coffee farmers in the developing world. The organization offers organic and gourmet coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa and chocolate bars produced by democratically run farmer co-ops in Latin America, Africa and Asia. By accompanying Equal Exchange on their trip, Quinn said he hoped that through his experience, he could gain enough knowledge and insight so that he could educate others about the significance of fair trade. "This program is important to everyone because Read more
News
June 30, 2008
Grand Rapids , MI ( 06-30-2008 )- Union members and social activists are gearing up for what may be the largest, global coordinated action against Starbucks ever. Protesters will decry what they see as an epidemic of anti-union terminations by the world's largest coffee chain. Starbucks and its CEO Howard Schultz have exhibited a pattern of firing outspoken union baristas ever since the advent of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union in 2004 and are demonstrating the same practice against the CNT union in Spain.
"On July 5th people around the world will show Starbucks that we, baristas Read more
"On July 5th people around the world will show Starbucks that we, baristas Read more
News
June 6, 2008
Ama Kade harvests cocoa pods in Ghana. Kanya Osori grows rice in northeastern Thailand. Palemon Cuno Surco creates traditional Peruvian pottery in a small village near Cusco. They live thousands of miles away from each other, speak different languages and their cultures couldn't be more different. But they do have something in common: people in Taos, New Mexico, and Media, Pennsylvania, want to buy their goods and pay them a fair price. So do the people in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These communities are part of a small but growing group committed to supporting fair Read more
News
Business Week
When TransFair CEO Paul Rice sits across from Wal-Mart (WMT) CEO H. Lee Scott, the differences in their backgrounds couldn't be more stark.
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
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
News
July 2, 2008
SEATTLE (AP) - For a decade it appeared there was no such thing as too many Starbucks for U.S. coffee drinkers, whose willingness to buy its $4 lattes and dark drip brews rationalized a second green-and-white mermaid awning just down the street - and sometimes even a third. But in a sign that those days are over, Starbucks Corp. announced Tuesday it will close 600 company-operated stores in the next year as the faltering U.S. economy hastened the pain caused by the company's own rapid expansion.
Starbucks shares, which have been falling steadily for nearly two years, jumped 72 Read more
Starbucks shares, which have been falling steadily for nearly two years, jumped 72 Read more
News
June 18, 2008
Under the carved wooden arches and the soft glow of the gothic St. John's Lutheran Church in downtown Des Moines, Pastor Rachel Mithelman delivers sermons to about 500 worshipers every weekend on how to live better lives as Christians. She also tells them to buy fair trade coffee and chocolate so that poor farmers around the world are paid a reasonable price for the goods they produce. "We live our lives unjustly in so many avenues, but fair trade is one way to ensure justice, and there is no reason to buy cheap coffee on the backs of poor farmers," says Mithelman. To back up her point, she Read more
News
Counterpunch
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 more News
May 19, 2008
No 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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