The Starbucks Cup Dilemma from Fast Company by Anya Kamenetz

Starbucks introduced paper cups in 1984, when it had just seven stores, as part of its transition from an artisanal roaster to the world's biggest specialty-coffee chain. It has taken various steps over the years to mitigate the environmental impact of its packaging. In 1997 (1,270 stores), Starbucks introduced the recycled cardboard-brown hot-beverage sleeve to cut down on double cupping. It fought the FDA for more than two years to get approval for the first hot-beverage packaging featuring 10% postconsumer recycled content. That cup, introduced in 2006 (12,440 stores), won the National Recycling Coalition's annual award. In 2008 (16,680 stores), Starbucks switched its plastic cups from polyethylene (No. 1) to polypropylene (No. 5), which uses 45% less greenhouse gases. As the company has grown, its cup-disposal problem "got to be a bee in the bonnet of [CEO] Howard Schultz," says Senge, the MIT business professor whose management philosophy book, The Fifth Discipline, is a worldwide best seller that popularized the concepts "learning organization" and "systems thinking." Senge originally got to know Starbucks through his work with the Sustainable Food Lab, a global network of NGOs and companies that work on international supply-chain-management practices around products like fair-trade coffee and cocoa. "These are the best NGOs and the best people in business around sourcing and food systems," he says. "They regard Starbucks as being as good as anybody in coffee."

Read the full FC article here.

The Facebook Drama "The Social Network" Won't Show You from Fast Company by Ellen McGirt

I think I can safely say that The Social Network is not the feel-good movie of the year – certainly not for Mark Zuckerberg, or for the dozens of exceptionally talented men and women who created Facebook. They were, and are, brilliant, hardworking and imaginative people who, mostly by design and occasionally by lucky accident, managed to survive the uniquely fraught early moments of an online start-up and the more established dangers of real-world Valley venture capital. It was a swirl alright, but not the way the film would have you think. There are, of course, exceptions to the exceptional: Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevii. (The goofy name that Zuckerberg stamped on the preternaturally entitled Winklevoss twins appears to be true. It delighted the audience.) The movie was based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaire, an entertaining read that was so breezily fictional that Janet Maslin of The New York Times skewered it: “The Accidental Billionaire is so obviously dramatized, and so clearly unreliable, that there’s no mistaking it for a serious document.” I’d read the script for the movie earlier this year and winced.

Check the Fast Company article out here.