>> Free Starbucks coffee! Take in your reusable mug to a Starbucks on April 15 — and get a free cuppa. Remember to take the Starbucks Challenge — which should be easier, since Starbucks stores are supposed to have the fair trade certified Cafe Estima brewing this week.

Earlier:
>> 7-Step program for the caffeine addicted: Coffee for environmentalists.
>> Starbucks doubles fair trade commitment.

>> Free salad and a Mixt gift bag! Mixt Greens will give out free tote bags — filled with a salad, eco-foodie recipes, and herb seeds to the first 150 customers who arrive at one of its two L.A. locations on Earth Day, Thurs., April 22.

>> 20% free raw meal at Rawvolution! Did I mention that you can get a 20% coupon for a meal at Rawvolution if you’re one of the first 20 people to sign up for CSA California with the Santa Monica pick up location? Yes I did, earlier today. Sign up now.

Illustration by Jasmin Chua, Worsted Witch

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These days, everyone in business seems to be trying to figure out one of 3 things: How to start a green business, how to make an existing business greener, or how to market a business to the green crowd. And Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business, written by long-time green business expert Joel Makower, appears like a business self-help book of sorts for achieving these green goals.

But if you’re looking for a simple green to-do checklist, you’ll be disappointed. Strategies for the Green Economy is no basic step-by-step guide . In fact, if this book teaches anything, it’s that there are no easy green one-size-fits-all method to follow.

That’s not to say that would-be green entrepreneurs can’t learn from Strategies for the Green Economy. It’s just that the lessons will be less directly instructional than anecdotal. The organization of the book, in fact, is a loose collection of stories — stories of what companies have tried and are trying, stories that’ll hopefully help other companies slowly cobble together and forge their own unique green paths.

Through the anecdotes, Strategies for the Green Economy lays out an informative history of green business and its relationships with both consumers and activists. Often, Joel’s sympathetic to businesses’ travails, detailing the confusing and often thankless task of greening a business. Enviro activists are “adept at confronting and challenging companies for their shortcomings and misdeeds but relatively inept at praising them when they change,” Joel says, and even points out that consumers that demand drastic green changes from companies are rarely willing to make anything beyond token changes in their own lives.

But while I agree with Joel’s assertion that consumer-activists often DO have knee-jerk anti-big business reactions, I also felt Joel too often praised token changes on the part of big companies. Case in point: One of my biggest greenwashing pet peeves is companies’ tendency to tout new green packaging — while doing little to green their actual products or services. This practice literally puts a green cover on an otherwise ungreen product to hook the would-be eco consumer. Yet many of the great green moves Joel touts have to do with improved green packaging!

Joel praises Coca-Cola for its plans for a new bottle-recycling facility (the plant recently opened) — no matter that soft drink’s bigger problem has to do with the carbon footprint of its unhealthy ingredients and the company’s “global corporate water hogging,” as Umbra puts it. Joel touts Hamburger Helper’s switch from wavy to flat noodles as a laudable eco-feat that reduced packaging, never mind the points made by Shannon Arvizu at TriplePundit: “Should we stop eating bow-tie or fusilli pasta on environmental principles? It’s not the shape of the noodles that really matters. In this case, it is what it’s made out of, how it’s made, and what it’s packaged in.”

That’s not to say all of Joel’s examples have to do with packaging — though the examples of more significant eco-moves were generally hard-won battles by enviro-activits. And of course, I get Joel’s point that the very LOHAS people that yell greenwashing at Hamburger Helper’s ironed-out noodles may be the same people buying the stuff — or at least the equally processed and overpackaged organic counterpart at Whole Foods.

For those who seek specific directives, Strategies for the Green Economy does give out a few absolute answers:

>> The vast majority of people aren’t going to buy an inferior product just because it’s greener. And people really, REALLY aren’t going to buy a more eco product if it’s way more expensive. Lesson: Don’t think you can sell crappy goods at high prices because you’re a green company.

>> Transparency on green initiatives is becoming business as usual. Lesson: Having no green plan is no longer an option. Joel provides a useful framework for crafting green strategies and messaging called CRED — Credibility, relevance, effective messaging, differentiation — that companies may find helpful.

And what’s the lesson in this book for enviro-activists? The lesson I’m taking away is that just as companies need to look at their unique challenges to create a green plan for themselves, enviro-activists need to also take into account these unique challenges for each individual company instead of blindly raging against the machine.

Thanks to Mark Pawlosky for reviewing this book earlier in Grist — which alerted me to the fact that I’m in the book because of The Starbucks Challenge. I’ve always wanted to see my name in an index!

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After years of begging, pleading, and boycotting from activists, Starbucks finally made a more serious commitment to fair trade coffee by promising to double its fair trade certified coffee purchases. This makes Starbucks the world’s largest buyer of fair trade coffee.

I find it interesting that this sudden change of heart from Starbucks comes now that the company’s not doing as well financially. Perhaps Starbucks discovered that greenwashing wasn’t quite as profitable as actually going green. Here’s a little history of Starbucks’ clashes with fair trade activism:

>> Activists have been trying to push Starbucks since at least 1997. Bruce Herbert, Director of the Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment and prez of Thomson Herbert Company, said that in 1995, Starbucks “adopted a Code of Conduct in a move to hold coffee growers accountable for acceptable working conditions, wages and basic rights forworkers” — but then stayed mum on the results of this code.

>> In Oct. 2005, City Hippy and I launched the first Starbucks Challenge, taking Starbucks up on its offer to make a cup of fair trade coffee for any customer who asks for one. Soon Starbucks said it was experiencing “a breakdown in customer service.”

>> In Feb. 2007, Starbucks announced at a fair trade convergence it won’t commit even 5% to fair trade. The company continued, however, to green up its image by talking about its own CAFE practices — a confusing self-created “certification program” touted as being (but actually wasn’t) even greener and more fair than fair trade.

>> In Sept. 2007, the SacBee wrote a damning expose on Starbucks. SacBee’s Tom Knudson spent 3 weeks in Ethiopia and found that the very Ethiopian farmers Starbucks purports to benefit are in fact living in poverty, forced to settle for a little charity here and there instead of receiving a fair price for their coffee.

>> Starbucks’ purchase of fair trace certified coffee stayed at a stagnant 6% in 2007, though according to its self-defined criteria, Starbucks’ coffee purchases from “sustainable suppliers went up from 53% to 65%.

Starbucks’ sudden support of fair trade certification now reminds me of Whole Foods’ similar fair trade conversion back in 2007. The grocery chain had formerly rejected fair trade certification for its Allegro coffee line, but after a lot of consumer pressure coming from all sides, decided to reverse course, launching a new initiative called Whole Trade and enlisting the help of TransFair USA, the nonprofit that certifies fair trade products in the US.

Similarly, Starbucks’ about face comes with the launch of a new initiative dubbed Starbucks Shared Planet and a joint press release with TransFair USA. TFUSA’s so psyched it wrote an exuberant letter to Zarah, fair trade blogger at Change.com, further hyping the deal.

Who’s next?

Illustration by Jasmin Chua, Worsted Witch

Update, 12/6/08: Starbucks UK goes 100% fair trade for its espresso drinks.

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>> Starbucks quietly settled an antitrust lawsuit with Penny Stafford of Belvi Coffee and Tea Exchange in Bellevue, who’d sued Starbucks after she was allegedly locked out of the best office space in Bellevue and Seattle by Starbucks’ exclusive leasing agreements with landlords. Stafford argued Starbucks’ “insatiable and unchecked ambition” amounts to being a monopoly.

>> Starbucks’ purchase of fair trace certified coffee stayed at a stagnant 6% in 2007, though according to its self-defined criteria, Starbucks’ coffee purchases from “sustainable suppliers went up from 53% to 65%.

>> Earlier this week, 100 Starbucks employees got laid off, including 25 at its Seattle headquarters. “In February, the company cut about 600 positions, some through attrition and about 220 through layoffs. Many of those jobs, including about a third of the layoffs, were at headquarters.” (via Starbucks Gossip) Maybe indie coffee shops are starting to win out?

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Despite Starbucks’ big ads in the NY Times, the mermaid’s far from being a worker-friendly and ethical company, Starbucks makes token green gestures here and there — then spins the hell out of them via its PR machine.

Now, an investigative piece in the Sacramento Bee‘s calling Starbucks on its bullshit. SacBee’s Tom Knudson spent 3 weeks in Ethiopia and found that the very Ethiopian farmers Starbucks purports to benefit are in fact living in poverty, forced to settle for a little charity here and there instead of receiving a fair price for their coffee.

Take the 3 footbridges Starbucks built in Ethiopia in 2004. By spending a mere $25,000 on these projects, Starbucks got to laud its forward-thinking charitable work in Ethiopia. But as Tadesse Meskela, a farmers co-op manager (and the star of the coffee film Black Gold) points out in the SacBee article: “If we are paid a (coffee) price which is decent, the people can make the bridge on their own…. We don’t have to be always beggars.”

Activists have been pushing Starbucks to become a better corporate citizen for years by making a more significant commitment to fair trade coffee — a move Starbucks continues to resist. Of course, Starbucks is always quick to point out that it pays $1.42 a pound for its coffee, 16 cents more than the fair trade minimum. What Starbucks doesn’t point out is that it’s comparing apples and oranges. Fair trade is about making sure the end coffee producer benefits, so the fair trade minimum price is strictly the amount that goes directly to the farmer co-op. Starbucks’ $1.42, on the otherhand, is the sum Starbucks pays to — someone. That someone’s usually a middleman in a long chain, not the coffee farmers.

In fact, Starbucks seems pretty hell bent on putting middlemen where none are needed; after all, paying the middleman saves Starbucks the costs of directly working with the farmers — while inflating this $1.42 figure Starbucks likes to put on its press releases. SacBee reports that in Chiapas, Mexico, Starbucks tried to get coffee farmers to sell to an exporter, instead of directly to Starbucks. The farmers cut off relations, saying that going through an exporter would drain their profits; Starbucks’ claim is that the farmers “were unable to manage it.”

Starbucks puts the same squeeze even on fair trade farms, as the NY Times exposed. Instead of paying the fair trade price to the Comon Yaj Noc Pic co-op in Mexico, Starbucks chose to forego the fair trade label, instead going through a middleman who paid the co-op just $1.23. Of course, if asked without specificity, Starbucks’ll state that the price they paid was $1.43 a pound and thus “better than fair trade,” without noting that that’s the sum they paid to the middleman, not the farmer.

Prices aside, Starbucks’ll often complain about fair trade certification itself, arguing that inspections for certification are shoddy or not thorough. Thus, the mermaid pushes its self-made CAFE Practices program as more comprehensive. What the SacBee investigation found, however, is that this CAFE system’s rather half-ass. No one from Starbucks or Scientific Certification Systems, the company Starbucks pays to oversee its CAFE program, visited an Ethiopian coffee farm that got CAFE certification, for example. An Africa-based company was hired to do the job — and apparently didn’t do it very well, because when SacBee started investigating, the inspector person got fired for doing a bad job.

What’s a coffee drinker with a latte habit to do? Stick to fair trade coffee. I’m working on putting together a US-wide list of coffee shops here. Among big chains, Noah’s Bagels has the fair trade Tribeca Blend brewing, while Tully’s and Dunkin’ Donuts use fair trade for their espresso drinks.

And if you’re stuck at Starbucks, try taking the Starbucks Challenge. Ask for a french-pressed cup of fair trade coffee, which baristas should provide for you at no extra charge per Starbucks’ company policy.

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