So, now that your coffee, chocolate, and bananas are all Fair Trade certified (they are, right?), you’ll be excited to know you can now play socially responsible ball with Fair Trade Sports.   Fair Trade Sports offers a wide variety of athletic equipment, including soccer balls, rugby balls, basketballs, and clothing, (the list goes on) produced in a safe and healthy work environment by adults who receive livable wages.   They even have a frisbee for all of us hippies hanging out on the grass.   While buying local and organic products is important for the health of humans and the environment, if the workers are not treated fairly and adequately compensated, those efforts are in vain.   Just listen to Eric Schlosser’s thoughts on the issue of worker’s rights:

Fall is a perfect time to get outside, make some new friends and kick, throw, or gently toss in the crisp, cool weather, and now you can enjoy the great outdoors with a clear conscience.   And it gets better.   Inspired by Paul Newman’s business philosophy, Scott James, the founder of Fair Trade Sports, donates all profits after taxes to children’s charities worldwide.   At a time when tumbling towers of greed are threatening to crush our financial system, it’s refreshing to know there are companies comitted to economic, environmental and social justice.

takepart by ordering your sporting goods from Fair Trade Sports and find other Fair Trade goods at worldofgood.com.

British designer Henry Holland has created a divine chocolate couture treat with this designer fashion easter egg, which will be auctioned off on eBay this week to benefit Barnardo’s children’s charity. Holland’s personal motto ‘Passio Factionis’ (Passion for Fashion) and his family coat of arms, which is regularly featured on his clothing line, is decorated on the 1kg chocolate egg in pastel-colored icing. Other celebrity designer chocolate eggs will be auctioned for Barnardo’s as well, including one by David Beckham’s tattooist, Louis Molloy.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to emancipate Easter eggs from the evils of excess packaging! British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury is eliminating some of its trademark purple packaging just in time for Easter with its launch of box-free, foil wrapped “Eco-eggs.”

The switch will enable Cadbury to “use 75% less plastic and 65% less cardboard than previously used in standard eggs,” according to Recycling & Waste Management News, which adds that Cadbury “has also committed to cutting packaging on its existing boxed eggs” and hopes to save a total of 1,130 tons of packaging this Easter. As Cadbury Easter senior manager Jo Grice told RWM:

“Expanding our range of more eco-friendly seasonal products is part of our overall Purple Goes Green environmental strategy where we have pledged to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% through a number of measures, including packaging.”

Cadbury’s famous milk chocolate eggs may be hollow, but this victory’s not; it’s another example of a corporation making good on its commitment to cut waste. Kudos to Cadbury. Now, if only they’d come out with a dark, fair trade chocolate egg. I can dream, can’t I?

Learn more about Cadbury’s Purple Goes Green initiative here.

Well, it always seemed too good to be true”chocolate as a health food? Not so fast, reports NPR’s Morning Edition, citing a recent editorial from British health journal the Lancet. Turns out that flavenols, those antioxidants that make dark chocolate so good for us, are also the ingredient that makes dark chocolate taste bitter. So some chocolate manufacturers actually remove the heart-healthy flavenols, leaving a confection that’s full of fat and sugar without any antioxidants to redeem it. Now that’s bitter.