Shop Talk
Retailers, consumers and prices
Check Out Line: Bring a mug, get free Starbucks java, save the world
Check out how Starbucks is working to persuade you to help save the planet by using fewer of its iconic paper cups.
On Thursday the company, which hands out about 4.75 million cups a day, is giving away free coffee to everyone who brings in a reusable mug or travel tumbler.
This latest promotion from the world’s biggest coffee chain comes as it works to hit its goal of serving one-fourth of its beverages in reusable cups by 2015.
The ubiquity of Starbucks coffee cups make them a powerful advertising vehicle. But the company’s popularity also has a dark side — discarded Starbucks cups contribute to pollution by creating tons of trash.
“Changing a habit is hard,” Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks’ U.S. business, told Reuters at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference in Southern California this week. “We can’t incentivize it more than free.”
Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president of global responsibility, said the company is taking a page from the grocery industry’s sustainability playbook.
“We want to do for the coffee cup what happened with the grocery bag,” Packard said, referring to the supermarkets industry success convincing many consumers to bring in their own shopping bags, rather than taking a new plastic bag with each visit.
Check Out Line: P&G shows its sustainable side
Check out Procter & Gamble’s environmental and social efforts.
P&G was added to the Global 100 list of the world’s most sustainable corporations in 2009. On Monday, the household products powerhouse released its latest sustainability report, “Designed to Matter.”
The report comes seven months after P&G raised its 2012 sustainability goals. P&G said that since 2002 it has cut water consumption by 52 percent, energy usage by 48 percent, carbon dioxide emissions by 52 percent and waste disposal by 53 percent in its operations.
The company has been making concentrated Tide detergent (shown here), for a few years. Industry watchers may recall that Wal-Mart pushed detergent makers to cut back on the use of water and plastic packaging. The smaller, lighter bottles also require less fuel to ship.
Through social responsibility programs, P&G has undertaken projects such as delivering millions of liters of clean drinking water to children in need. P&G said that $13.1 billion in sales since 2007 have come from products with a significantly lower environmental impact.
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Check Out Line: A greener eBay?
Check Out eBay’s steps toward becoming more environmentally friendly.
The online auctioneer announced its first greenhouse gas emissions reduction target on Monday, saying it has committed to a 15-percent cut to its corporate emissions by 2012, over a 2008 baseline.
EBay said it will achieve that target through continuing investments in renewable energy and promoting “sustainable” habits tied to the travel and personal energy use of its 15,000-strong workforce.
EBay said that as an online company, a majority of its carbon footprint comes from the energy used at its data centers. So, tackling data management and infrastructure will be key to becoming more efficient. To that end, the company will unveil a “green” data center in 2010. EBay also said it will announce a fuel cell strategy in early 2010.
Among the initiatives taken by its employees — a community garden project, participating in “National Cycle to Work” week and electronics recycling, with over 8,200 pounds of personal electronic equipment.
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Molson Coors-sponsored survey finds water pollution key concern
What is the latest and most important environmental concern these days? Global warming? Disappearing ice caps and rain forests? Reliance on non-renewable energy?
Wrong. According to a new survey sponsored by Molson Coors Brewing Co, water pollution ranked No. 1, followed by fresh water shortages, depletion of natural resources, air pollution and loss of animal and plant species.
The survey was commissioned by Circle of Blue, a nonprofit affiliate of the Pacific Institute, a water and climate think tank. It polled people in 15 countries, including the United States, Mexico, China and India, about their views on water issues including sustainability, management and conservation.
Molson Coors, maker of Coors Light and Molson Canadian beers, sponsored the survey as a first step in trying to understand how people in international markets — where it hopes to expand its business — view water.
Molson Chief Executive Peter Swinburn said that as the company expands internationally, it must understand what a local community’s issues are and try to address them before spending money and building a factory.
“We’re a branded organinzation. We live by research and consumer opinion,” Swinburn said in an interview. ”To try and address a problem without going to consumers and understanding their perceptions is difficult to do.”
Of the seven ”focus” countries, consumers in Mexico seemed to take the problem of water pollution the most seriously, with 90 percent of respondents calling it a “very serious problem.” The rest of the countries ranged from 58 percent in Britain to 71 percent in Canada.
I love this article. I am publishing a book by the name of “GETTIN GREEN”. It is a magazine that will be going out world wide to educate people on global warming and what we can do about it. Each household will be challenged to cut their carbon footprint by 25%. I would likw to publish this article in the “GETTIN GREEN” magazine with your permission. Any other articles you may have or would like to submitt would be greatly appreciated. You will of coarse be recognized for your writtings. Please get back to me as soon as possible.
The greening of Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart, which helped promote the adoption of those funny-looking “green” lightbulbs, is making more room in its Sam’s Club warehouse stores for environmentally friendly products — including a water-saving toilet that has one button for flushing liquids and another for flushing solids.
Employees at a Sam’s Club in the discounter’s home town in Bentonville, Arkansas, have emptied shelves of things like power tools to make way for a variety of green products. Similar efforts have taken place in Sam’s Clubs across the United States.
“Our members need and are looking for things that will help them mitigate their energy bills,” said Joel Heiligenthal, buyer of home efficiency products at the club store chain.
Wal-Mart launched its own private-label compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) in 2007 and has been selling them in thousands of stores.
As part of an environmental push started under former CEO Lee Scott, Wal-Mart also has outlined plans to one day be supplied by 100 percent renewable energy.
Check out this video of new CEO Mike Duke telling reporters about the company’s ongoing sustainability efforts in a press conference on June 5.
(Photos: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi; Video/Lisa Baertlein)
The short story the Walton family.
Wal-mart was the giant’s shop that currently is spread almost all through the world, but inside in their wealthy, they forgot with someone who the real founder of Wal-Mart / WalMart, this Person was Mr. James Lawrence Walton/Bud Walton. All the big Walton surnames were recorded to the domain name, only http://www.JamesLawrenceWalton.com was forgotten and is currently owned by the other person in fact his not Americans.
We thing There none of Walton family even his daughter, maybe they too busy to count they money.
Love and money, sometime make someone confuse …
I see it a funny thing for richest family.
For Father’s Day, suit shows greener side of Sears
Hey guys, this isn’t your pop’s polyester.
Just in time for Father’s Day shopping, Sears will roll out a line of men’s suits made of the first high-tech fabric that blends wool with polyester spun from recycled plastic soda bottles.
The suit separates, sold under Sears’ Covington Perfect brand, will be on racks in about 500 U.S. Sears stores in May. Price: $175 for the jacket and $75 for the pants, according to Tim Danser, vice president of marketing for Bagir Group Ltd., the Israeli manufacturer that tailors the garments for Sears’ private label.
And get this: This suit is machine washable and can be tossed in the dryer, eliminating the need for dry cleaning and upping the eco-friendly ante, Danser said.
“This isn’t the polyester of the 1970s,” Moses Cohen, sales and marketing manager for N.I. Teijin Shoji (USA), Inc., the New York arm of Teijin, the Japanese chemical company that makes the suit fabric, said during a men’s fashion briefing at the swanky Kitano Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
Teijin, which developed fabrics made of recycled plastic blended with wool, viscose and cotton or with other synthetics, also partners with retailers to recycle used polyester clothing back into fabric and new clothes.
“This has a nicer hand to it,” Cohen said, running his fingers over the sleeve of his own jacket, acknowledging that “polyester still has some bad connotations” due to the quality of the “disco era” fabric of more than 30 years ago. (For devotees of the 1981 cult comedy film, “Polyester,” this is your cue: Thanks a lot, John Waters!)
Did you power down for Earth Hour?
The Las Vegas strip (below) and other global icons went dark on Saturday for Earth Hour.
We turned off ALL the power in the house, using the master switch on the fuse box, no eletric used at all.
Had a beer or three, told a couple of goast stories, snuggled up with each other.
It was great 
Also took the time tried to work out why the U.S thinks it needs to consume so much more energy per person than the rest of the world, with huge engined cars, air-con everywhere and lush green golf courses out in deserts for god’s sake!
Still, now that Bush and his ‘Don’t worry about the enviroment, God will step in and fix his creation if we screw it up to much’ approach are no longer, maybe a policy based on observed data and a scientific look at the problems being encounted and potential solutions will some some beneficial outcomes.
Say start with $10 per gallon gas price and take it from there.
Target uses “People” to get people to go green
We’ve all seen stores touting reusable shopping bags. They’re a trendy way to ditch those regular plastic bags and they’re often pretty cheap — 99 cents at Target and some supermarkets, 50 cents at Wal-Mart and sometimes they’re even free. Now, Target is taking the reusable tote idea to a new medium. The discount chain took out ads on the inside front cover and the back cover of the latest issue of People touting green ideas. The most intriguing one if you’re in the market for one of those bags is to use the cover as an envelope, send in five plastic Target bags and get a coupon for a free Target tote.
Readers don’t even have to pay for the stamp — Target and TerraCycle, the company that made the “Retote” bag, already paid the postage.
On the back of the magazine, Target pointed out ways to go green and save green at its stores, such as buying its Archer Farms organic fruit snacks. To show how earth-friendly it has become, Target even shows off a gift card made from a corn-based material that’s biodegradable in a backyard compost. Just make sure you spend the moolah on that card before you throw it out to pasture.
(Reuters photo)
How green is your coffee habit?
Despite the wide range of organic and other “green” coffee on the market, 67 percent of coffee drinkers who frequent coffee shops admit to discarding used paper cups into a regular trash can rather than a recycling bin, according to a new survey of 1007 Internet users conducted by Kelton Research and commissioned by Tata Group’s Good Earth Coffee. That means about 28 billion cups (100 million pounds of paper) end up in U.S. landfills every year.
The study also showed that 42 percent of Americans believe it takes less time for a paper coffee cup to decompose (20 years) than a newspaper (2 weeks). Not to mention the fact that many paper coffee cups can’t be recycled or composted because of the materials with which they are coated.
More than 30 percent of survey respondents said they were willing to pay extra for organic coffee or coffee that came in an eco-friendly container.
Meanwhile, the weak U.S. economy appears to be making a dent when it comes to improving the environment. That’s because the biggest consumer trend in coffee is brewing your own at home — maybe saving some green will also help save the planet.
(Photo: Reuters)
Brewing your own at home is gaining in popularity across the U.S.
We’ve created an 8 Step Coffee Cupping Guide that anyone can do at home.
http://www.jamaicanbluemountaincoffeeonl ine.com/Coffee-Cupping.html
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