Green Options

The Sydney Morning Herald, The Dallas Morning News and The Sun published articles today that estimated that the Starbucks wastes up to 6 million gallons of water every day. The Sun said,

As part of a company policy aimed at preventing germ buildup in its taps, Starbucks stores are directed to keep water running constantly into a sink, called a dipper well, to clean utensils and wash away food residue.

As a result of running water all day, every day at each of the company’s 10,000 worldwide coffee emporiums, Starbucks wastes water in an amount The Sun estimated, to be enough daily water for the entire 2 million strong population of drought-hit Namibia in Africa or fill an Olympic pool every 83 minutes. A single Starbucks tap left running for just over three minutes wastes the amount of water one African needs to survive for a day in drought conditions.

Ethos is indirectly the origin of the modern English word ethics and the definition of ethics (from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary is:

a set of moral principles : a theory or system of moral values

The New Internationalist Magazine (NI) June 2008 issue brought to light “Bullshit in a Bottle”. Just so happens, Ethos has a new definition. It’s the name of a bottled water company with a slick website and “is a profit-making enterprise disguised as humanitarian relief”.