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.

Today is Starbucks Free Coffee Day! We all love free stuff but instead of getting your cup of joe on the house today, you can also choose to go to Starbucks and order a cup of their Fair Trade certified coffee.

In 2000, Starbucks started a campaign promising that they will brew a pot of fair trade coffee for anyone who asks for it. Learn more about the Starbucks fair trade campaign here and here.

Visit Transfair USA to learn more and

Also, watch the amazing documentary Black Gold which explores the world of coffee and trade.

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Meet Italy’s latest gift to civilization–Justine, the world’s first coffee-making robot. Justine is the brainchild of Naples University Professor Bruno Siciliano, who heads up a project called DEXMART, dedicated to creating “useful, two-armed robots,” as dvice.com reports.

Before you get all excited about the prospect of having your own personal R2D2-style barista whipping you up a perfectly frothed cappuccino with just a dash of cinnamon, though, there’s something you should know about Justine; she only knows how to make instant. So all you Starbucks baristas can relax, your jobs are safe. For now.

Learn more about the latest in robot research at robots.net.

The demand for Robusta coffee beans””the kind used to make instant coffees like Nestlé’s Nescafe””is so robust that Indonesian coffee growers have taken to illegally clearing parts of the country’s national parks in order to grow more of this lucrative crop.

The illicit coffee growers are displacing the wild elephants who live in these parks, causing them to, well, run wild and trample the encroaching plantations. So the coffee growers have been killing the elephants, whose numbers are dwindling as their habitat shrinks.

And all this so westerners can have their instant coffee. Nestlé buys a lot of coffee from this region, and 40 percent of it comes from local traders, but a Nestlé spokesman told ABC News that Nestlé doesn’t know where the beans actually come from:

“It might come — we have no way of knowing — from illegal sources. Law enforcement is not our task. & We are working with local farmers to increase output from legal, existing plantations.”

The World Wildlife Fund has spent a year investigating Indonesia’s illegal coffee trade, trying to stop the slaughter of the elephants. Adam Tomasek, who works for the WWF, asked ABC News:

“How does a coffee producer in Europe or North America know that the coffee they’re buying hasn’t come from here? They don’t. And that’s actually the root of the problem”¦a consumer can have absolutely no confidence in what they are purchasing.”

Learn more about the WWF’s efforts on behalf of the elephants here.