Starbucks baristas encouraged to discuss race relations with customers
Coffee house giant Starbucks published a full page ad in the New York Times on Sunday — a stark, black, page with a tiny caption “Shall We Overcome?” in the middle, and the words “RaceTogether” with the company logo at the bottom. The ad is part of an initiative launched this week by the chain to stimulate conversation and debate about race in America. Starbucks baristas will have the option to hand customers cups on which they’ve handwritten the words “Race Together” and start a discussion about race. In a video addressing Starbucks’ nearly 200,000 workers, 40% of whom are members of a racial minority, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz dismissed the notion that race was too hot a topic business-wise for Starbucks to tackle. “It’s an emotional issue. But it is so vitally important to the country,” he said. (Fortune)
Levi’s asks its customers to wash less
Levi Strauss and Co. has announced it has saved one billion litres of water since 2011 through its Water<Less™ process, which reduces the water used in garment finishing by up to 96 percent. But the announcement coincides with the release of the company’s new Product Lifecycle Assessment (LCA), which shows that cotton cultivation (68 percent) and consumer use (23 percent) continue to have the most significant impact on jeans’ water consumption. Based on the study’s findings, Levi’s is launching a new education campaign to ensure consumers understand their environmental impact. By taking the “Are You Ready to Come Clean?” quiz, consumers around the world will be able to find out how much water and energy they use compared to the average in the US, UK, France and China. Between World Water Day and Earth Day, consumers are encouraged to take a pledge to wash their jeans less often. (Sustainable Brands)
Collaboration
Railsponsible Initiative aims to drive rail freight sustainability
EcoVadis, the online sustainable global supply chain platform, has announced the launch of Railsponsible, an initiative to drive sustainability throughout the railway supply chain. Six companies in the railway industry – Alstom Transport, Bombardier Transportation, Deutsche Bahn, Knorr Bremse, NedTrain and SNCF – are participating as founding members of Railsponsible. The Railsponsible mission is to embrace continuous improvement, share best practices, drive common understanding across the industry, and to use Ecovadis’s platform to assess, monitor and improve supplier CSR performance. Several global companies are making an effort to make freight transportation more sustainable. FedEx, Walmart and UPS continue innovating to improve the efficiency of their truck fleets, while in Europe, Unilever has shifted away from trucks toward rail transport. (Sustainable Brands)
Environment
World’s protected natural areas receive eight billion visits a year
The world’s national parks and nature reserves receive around eight billion visits every year, according to the first study into the global scale and economic value of nature-based tourism in protected areas. The paper, by researchers in Cambridge, UK, Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, says that this number of visits could generate as much as $600 billion of tourism expenditure annually – a huge economic benefit which vastly exceeds the less than $10 billion spent safeguarding the sites each year. Scientists and conservation experts describe current global expenditure on protected areas as “grossly insufficient”, and have called for greatly increased investment in the maintenance and expansion of protected areas as well as saving incalculably precious natural landscapes and species from destruction. (University of Cambridge)
Energy
UK carbon capture industry ‘feasible and affordable’, study finds
A large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry is both “feasible and affordable” in the UK, and would lower the cost of meeting CO2 targets and ensure jobs in energy-intensive industries are not lost overseas. That is the conclusion of the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) in a new report. The report calculates that new infrastructure could trap around 50 million tonnes of CO2 emissions before piping the gas to be held in storage sites under the North Sea, ensuring the UK’s large polluters, such as fossil fuel power plants or steel and cements factories, could continue to operate without breaching the UK’s carbon targets. The ETI says the UK already has the offshore engineering expertise to develop an effective CCS sector, but will need to invest in infrastructure such as pipelines to make this vision a reality. (BusinessGreen)
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