Cup to Napkin- Starbucks is trying to make the world a better place

The first Starbucks store opened in 1971  with two goals in mind: to share great coffee and to try to make the world a little better. Since then, Starbucks Company has been committed to give high quality coffee and great service to its customers worldwide. Part of its mission statement is to always provide the highest quality coffee from the finest coffee beans and improving the lives of people who grow them. On top of that, environmental stewardship is an driving force of their success globally.

The video above talks about Green Building as part of their steps toward environmental stewardship. Starbucks has been striving to build energy efficient and environmentally friendly stores since 2001 while working closely with the U.S Green Building Council in developing all kinds of certification systems. The goal is to build all new company-owned stores with LEED certification standards. In addition to greening its stores, Starbucks has also committed itself to waste reduction, energy and water conservation, and reducing climate change.

In order to reduce its waste significantly, Starbucks not only recycles but also works on greener reusable cups and composting. Commercial recycling is not as easy as residential and there are a lot of obstacles into implementing it in all Starbucks stores but they are trying to find  ways to make it easier and more efficient. Throughout the years, Starbucks has developed several initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of their disposable cups. Two ways they are doing this is by providing recyclable cups and also incentives for customer’s use of reusable cups.

Starbucks is also concerned about water conservation and strives to reduce its water consumption and waste with the use of better technology such as low flow faucets, and infiltration techniques. In some places, Starbucks implemented drought-resistant native species in the landscaping in order to eliminate the need for irrigation.

But the biggest problem of Starbucks is its energy usage and it is a still a challenge. With its huge dependency on electricity, Starbucks’ energy policy has been to switch to more efficient light bulbs, to reduce energy usage from heating and cooling equipment, and buying renewable energy credits from wind farms. The goal is to cover 100% of energy consumption with renewable energy by 2015.

Last but not least, Starbucks is striving to help local community of coffee grower by providing loans, expertise, and buying fair trade coffee. Starbucks partners with Conservation International to ensure proper buying guidelines to address what they call “ethical sourcing coffee.” Basically, the phrase means acquiring coffee through responsible purchasing practices- coffee price, proper working conditions, farmers loans- fostering good relationships with farmers, and conservation programs.

A more detailed information of how Starbucks is putting effort into protecting the environment is available at their website.

 

Grassroots Activism at its best

Grassroots activism consists of actions taken by groups of like-minded people working together for a cause they believe in. The actions vary from elaborate meetings, fund raisers, march, protesting and extreme methods. Many protesters undertaking extreme actions often end up in prison for a certain amount of time.

Grassroots activists are usually not affiliated to any political party. In fact, their campaigns are often directed toward existing policies of the major political powers. Some of the major concerns of the grassroots activists are any kind of freedom – political or speech-, animal rights and environmental issues.

Coal mining is one of the major environmental problems grassroots campaigns are focusing on and this is happening worldwide.

In the United States, the fight against mountain top-removal in the Appalachia region has gained a lot of attention. Appalachian Voices is a grassroots environmental organization focusing on environmental issues in the Appalachian Mountain regions. One of their goal is to end mountain top removal coal mining. Some of the ways they came up with to achieve that goal are the creation of a national movement to influencing federal and state legislation, a free bimonthly publication called The Appalachian Voice , and the showing of a compelling multimedia entitled Appalachian Treasures to inform the public at church and community center. How a Grassroots Rebellion won the Nation’s Biggest Climate Victory is an article that talks about the victory of grassroots activism in fighting mountain top removal coal mining.

In Australia, grassroots activism against coal seam gas has taken the next step as more than 3000 people showed up to march across the Sea Cliff Bridge in the Illawarra to protest against coal seam gas mining plans in the area. The Coal Seam Gas has been claiming that it is a clean alternative to coal and that it emits 70% less greenhouse gas than coal, but the australian population knows that the claims are not accurate. The industry has also launched personal attacks on grassroots activists opposing their plans; however, it did not stop the australians to participate in one of their most democratic campaign in years.

Worldwide, grassroots activists are working hard to protect their families, homes, and lands against mining industry, building of dams and roads, water extraction and other activities. The Standing on Sacred Ground movie showcases the stories of eight indigenous communities fighting for the preservation of the nature and their culture. Theses stories are great examples of grassroots activism at its best.

 

Environmental Justice

John Muir once said “when we try to pick out things by itself, we find it hitched with everything else in the universe.”

That sentence wraps up the basis of environmental problems we are facing today. As these problems range from health hazards, climate change, depletion of resources to lack of food, it is hard for the human population to find acceptable solutions that will deal perfectly with each problem. Nonetheless, the public’s knowledge of the complexity of environmental issues has increased significantly over the years thanks to online resources, media coverage, and accessibility of information by organizations, scientists and individuals.

Environmental Justice

Environmental injustice contributes to the problem related to environment but leaning more toward the people and their well-being.

The idea behind environmental justice is that all people regardless of race, income, gender, color, nation or origin deserve equal environmental protection. In other words, there should be equal distribution of the burdens and benefits of any activities potentially harmful to the environment.

Here in the United States, poor people and minorities are the victim of such injustice as they bear the cost of industrialization. Studies have shown that they are more likely to live in the most polluted areas and exposed to toxic materials that endanger their health and well-being. In addition, local officials often neglect and disregard complaints by minority communities regarding environmental protection.

Globally, developing countries face the most terrifying consequences of climate change as the result of huge amount of greenhouse gases emission from many of the developed country like the United States. Africa has experienced severe drought in the past years that killed many people as result of climate change even though they are the least contributing to the carbon emission to the atmosphere. In other countries, flood and hurricanes are devastating cities leaving people homeless with no access to food and clean water.

 Food justice

An important part of environmental justice that needs to be addressed relates to the right of all people to have access to quality food, also known as food security. Food security still presents a huge problem in several countries around the world. The problem comes from the presence of food desert throughout black communities and low income neighborhood. A food desert is a place where people do not have access to a grocery store. Several Nashville communities are actually considered as food desert. In fact, a study shown in the Nashville City Paper revealed that there are more than 16,000 people- 2.6% of Davidson County residents who have no means of transportation and live more than a mile away of the nearest supermarket.

Food security is only a small fragment of the environmental justice problem, yet it touches a lot of people from the most developed countries to the poorest countries in the world. As John Muir said, the issues are all connected and it is hard to only select one out of them all. It all comes back to the 3Ps of sustainability, people, profit, planet and how they are interwoven.

 

Biomimicry and all its facets

The concept of biomimicry evolves around finding sustainable solutions by emulating natures’ design, form, and processes. One of pioneers of this discipline is Janine Benyus author of the book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature in 1997.

On March 27-28, Lipscomb University hosted the 5^th annual Sustainable Business Summit featuring Janine Benyus and other sustainable leaders. Janine’s speech showcased several examples of biomimicry application into different industry. Two of them are listed here: Japanese train and Sharklet surface protection.

Japan adopted the concept of biomimicry into their transportation by having their train designed like the head of a kingfisher bird. This made the train a lot quieter and go faster while using less electricity.

Sharklet Technologies are mimicking the pattern on the skin of the Galapagos shark to prevent bacteria adhesion on surfaces such as door knobs in hospital.

Janine brought up the idea of energy without fossil fuel in her talk, which would be a huge path towards the environmental movement. When I asked her the ways biomimicry can help reduce our dependency on fossil fuel, she pointed out two things: “reduce demand for energy and conservation.” She emphasized the need to use current sunlight and finding ways to capture the available energy through processes such as artificial photosynthesis or VIVACE.

But biomimicry is not always easy even if it provides great solutions to our problem. In fact, a lot of obstacles prevent biomimicry to be fully adopted into our design and creation. Janine Benyus revealed some of them during our interview. The first obstacle is our cheap way of doing things, meaning that “biomimicry fails not because it doesn’t work but the current technology is cheaper.” Second obstacle is that the technology is hard and industries such as construction industry, are very conservative. They do not favor change.  Third obstacle is that some people still think of biomimicry as a hippie non-sense, therefore they do not take it seriously nor pay attention to it.

Furthermore, Janine pointed out that engineers often are not humble enough to get ideas from something that does not look like us humans, which is really a sad thing because nature has been thriving on this earth for much longer than we have. This mentality issue will take time to change. So even if biomimicry has come a long way from the publication of Janine’s book till its adoption by some industry, it still has a lot to overcome.

 

What do you think about the loose way the constitution is being interpreted today?

There is no one right way to interpret the Constitution. It depends on the situation or the case in which it is applied. For me, the loose interpretation gives the constitution some flexibility to better fit the case it is applied to.

First of all, the constitution is short and it does not cover every eventuality that might happen. However, during disputes, judges have to interpret the Constitution to solve the problem. The concept of constitutional interpretation is foreign in some countries, where the constitution makes a reasonable effort to cover every eventuality. These constitutions are generally rigid and little changing, adapting slowly to advances in political views, popular opinion, technology, and changes in government. The U.S. Constitution, however, has been termed a Living Constitution, in part because it grows and adapts to internal and external pressures, changing from one era and generation to the next.

There is also the argument that the law is made for men not the men for the law, as seen in the Bible about the Sabbath. Therefore, the Constitution has to be interpreted according to the situation it is being applied to. This leads us to 2 extremes: those who want to interpret the Constitution by determining what the framers intended to do or say and those who want to look at the Constitution as if it was ratified today, what meaning it would have if it was written today. The main argument between the two is that the Constitution would be irrelevant if only viewed with the 18^th century eyes while the first one think that the original intent is the most pure way to interpret the Constitution. The point is that the Constitution needs to be interpreted if we want it to be effective. Strict constitution would not be able to resolve any of the controversial topics we are facing like abortion or same sex marriages.

 

Security vs. Freedom post 9/11

A lot of things have changed following the 9/11 attack on the United States and one of them is our freedom to access useful information from the different agencies of the government. Freedom that individuals, interest groups, journalists, environmental groups and many other had under the Freedom of Information Act got stripped away as a safety measure against terrorism. In fact, the U.S. Congress passed a new law in 2002, the Homeland Security Act, that would give them the right to block all information that are potential asset for terrorist from public access.

This article in USATODAY shows how difficult information accessibility was post 9/11. So now we are faced with this dilemma of not wanting to get blown up by another terrorist attack and wanting to make sure that industries and chemical plants are still following the environmental regulations and standards set by the EPA or other agencies. As Robert Cox stated in Environmental Communication and Public Sphere, “although intended to limit information useful to terrorists, some of the restrictions on information also limit the ability of journalists and environmental groups to address perceived problems or to publicize inadequate performance by government agencies or private businesses.”

No one would argue about the importance of national defense, especially after being hit once, thus the executive branch do have the right to restrict the public’s access to information if it might aid terrorist. I believe that national defense is much more critical than enforcing regulations on coal plants but I think that a line should be drawn on who can access the information and who cannot. Restricting information’s access bluntly to everyone is just too easy and leads to more problem. Let’s see for example the BP deep water oil spill, the  issue is believed to be safety failure, thus could have been prevented with stricter rules. Environmental and interest groups are the people who care about things like this and voice out whenever a company does not follow the rules; however, when such information is blocked for them to see, then businesses tend to overlook the standards and do as they want, in this case causing a huge environmental disaster.

So the solution really is to find a balance between the safety of the people and the right of people to be informed. Not every single individual should be granted access but at least those trying to help prevent other accidents such as the BP oil spill. Most of the time it is easier and cheaper for chemical plants or oil refineries to get quick fix, but those are the ones that cause accidents, leading to the death and injury of many workers and also tons of money to recover. As we are already spending billions of dollars in national defense, the government should find ways to filter the access to the information on the EPA or fish and wildlife services to be accessible to those who need it. Moreover most often, terrorists will target financial buildings not chemical plants and industries, thus one more reason to loosen up the restriction.

 

Global Warming issue

Environmental problems have always existed even before people were aware of them. The only difference now is that the problems are very concrete. According to the book Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, Robert Cox says that one of the first environmental issue in America dates from the late 18th century, which was the exploitation of wild areas. Many people were not aware at that time that depleting the wild areas of the earth would be considered as a problem, simply because of the lack of education on the importance of conservation back then.

Another example is the emission of greenhouse gases from industries and vehicles that are now one of the biggest cause of climate change. The industrial revolution started in the 18th and 10th century and coal was one the primary fuel to power those industries. However, the concern about the carbon emission from those industries on human health and the environment did not begin until the 60s-70s with the enactment of Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

AL Gore introduced me to the problem of global warming with his movie Inconvenient truth a few years ago. The New York Times calls it “the most complicated issue facing world leaders” in this article of Dec 21, 2011 . Despite the facts and all the talk about global warming, not everybody agrees that it is a problem neither they believe its existence. There are several reasons behind the disbelief. One of them is the use of the  term “global warming” since the actual problem is climate change, which can be reflected by disruptions of seasons, sky high temperatures, and extremely low winter. So calling it “global warming” is very misleading.

Another reason is the unclear connection between the emission of greenhouse gases and the change in climate. Even though scientists can back this up with data dating from several decades ago, there is no concrete proof of the cause. Thus people are reluctant in making the connection. Moreover, in places where poverty reigns, people are less concern about global warming because they are faced with a more important problem, their survival.

In the less developed countries, individuals are more concern about trying to feed themselves and their family that there is no space for them to worry about global warming. In the rich countries however, there are too much conflict between the economy and protecting the environment. People focusing on improving the economy do not want to compromise to try to solve the global warming problem.

Another reason for people not to think of global warming as a problem is the lack of education and awareness, for people who live in remote areas for example. Most of the time, it also depends on the way of communicating the problem to the population. Even in developed countries, if the communication method is not very effective, the message would not be delivered with its intended purposes and it will lead to misinterpretation and disbelief.