If you like me, enjoy an occasional warm frothy latte you might be interested to know that not all coffee shops are equal when it comes to protecting the environment and generally behaving in an ethical and sustainable manner.

Walk along most highstreet’s and you will likely be greeted with the big three coffee shop chains in the UK – Starbucks, Costa or Caffè Nero.  These 3 dominate the market, Costa has a 37% share, Starbucks on 23% and Caffè Nero on 14% (although McDonalds sells more coffee than any other company in the UK).

If you can tear yourself away from the big 3 you can find alternatives that are often 100% fairtrade and with many other excellent credentials.  Ethical Consumer Magazine have rated the highstreet coffee houses and ranked them in the following order.  Of the nationwide chains in this report, AMT Coffee is rated the best. With its 100% Fairtrade coffee and 100% organic milk it’s a clear winner.

1. AMT
2. Costa Coffee
3. BBs Coffee & Muffins
4. Coffee republic
5. Soho Coffee Company
6. Caffee Neto
7. Puccinos
8. Starbucks (Did you know they provided the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with Starbucks coffee kiosks)
9. Caffe Ritazza

If you dig into Ethical Consumer’s report it is really outrageous what goes behind those capucinnos. Click here for full report to find out the detail.  I have highlighted a few of the findings on Starbucks report as this was (until reading this) my guilty pleasure.  Shocking stuff!

According to this report Starbucks has:

1. Had six settlements in three years for complaints to the US National Labor Relations Board of violating workers’ rights.

2. Has provided US staff with worse health care coverage than Wal-Mart and recently doubling health insurance costs.

4. Refused for 6 years to give in to pressure from campaigners to ban the genetically engineered artificial ‘recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone’ from its dairy supply chain.

5. Been criticised by World Cancer Research Fund called the “alarming” sale of iced coffee containing over a quarter of a woman’s daily calorie requirement

5. Boosted CEO Howard Schultz’s income up by 25% in 2009, a year in which the company slashed costs by $580 million, partly by reducing its work force by 19%.

6. Been exposed by the Sun in 2008 for wasting 23.4m litres of water every day (enough to fill the ubiquitous Olympic pool “every 83 minutes”) due to running a tap in-store non-stop..

7. Although a lot of the coffee sold in SB in the UK is Fairtrade elsewhere it is a different story, in 2009,  it was a little over 10% of the coffee sold was Fairtrade.