Blowin’ in the Wind
Lots of people don’t like Starbuck for lots of different reasons. They come in to town and force indpendents out, they contribute to the McDonald’s-ification of the world, so no matter where you are you can be assured you can get a Big Mac and a Mochaccino, they don’t do enough as corporate citizens to ensure fair wages of coffee growers or that coffee is produced in environmentally sound ways.
All that may be true, but this week Starbucks made a step in the direction of doing better for the environment by pledging to buy “green tags” in the amount of energy used by five percent of its stores to go toward production of wind power (for the full story, check out The P-I). They aren’t actually buying the energy, they’re buying the production of energy, in the form of 11 windmills. This will cut the company’s greenhouse emissions by two percent and put the company in the top 25 percent of alternative energy consumers in the country.
Which tells you one thing: there ain’t a lot of big companies buying into alternative energy if five percent of Starbucks makes them the top 25 percent of users.
I don’t guess this really has anything to do with the coffee house experience, but it is nice to see a big company make a small effort toward helping the planet.
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