Fair Trade

I have been buying Fair Trade products for many years, although I was maybe not aware of the wide range that is now available.  I remember trying the coffee for the first time many years ago, and not really being that thrilled with it.

Chocolate with the Fair Trade logo

Chocolate with the Fair Trade logo

That said, there was a time when I regularly bought the orange juice and the quinoa.

I returned to the subject a couple of weeks ago during a seminar in Frankfurt, where there was not only a presentation about the Fair Trade principles and organisation, but a chance to try some of the chocolate that is produced, one type of which was actually very good.

One question that came up was whether there were coffee pads with the Fair Trade certification – and apparently there are.  So I set off in search of them.

For a while now my company has been buying a brand of sugar that carries the Fair Trade logo, and now – after visiting several supermarkets in the area – I can happily say that we have switched to the coffee pads as well.  Not only do I think that the coffee tastes better than when I first tried it all those years ago, but the pads are actually cheaper than the brand we were using before!

Which products do you buy?

Zuckersteuer

This podcast also talks about Pfeffersteuer (pepper tax) and Schokoladensteuer (chocolate tax).

Zuckersteuer was a tax in Germany on sugar.  The tax was originally introduced in Prussia in 1841 – one year after the sugar cube was invented.  Sugar had become more popular in previous years following the introduction of the sugar beet.

The tax was discontinued at the end of 1992.

To hear a simple explanation and a short discussion in German, listen to the podcast:

(Press the “play” button to listen to the podcast)

Download the MP3 file | Subscribe to the podcast

A lorry powered by… chocolate?

It sounds (or should that be tastes?) too good to be true. Yes, it really is a lorry powered by chocolate. Well, almost.

I came across this story on the BBC News website and it sounds like a crazy, also an innovative idea.

Put quite simply: the waste left over from cocoa when making chocolate is being recycled into bio-diesel. To make people aware of the project, the lorry is being driven from the UK quite literally to Timbuktu.

Why do I like this project? Well, since I started following news items about biofuels I have probably seen as many arguments against them as I have seen in favour of them.

This project seems to defeat most of the arguments against them: nothing is being grown especially to make the fuel, no trees are being chopped down.  The only question remaining is: does it take more or less energy to process the waste into bio-diesel than it did to process it before?

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