Two salon owners wanted to go zero-waste. Could they do it and keep their business afloat?

Scisters Salon & Apothecary in the San Diego area is committed to sustainable beauty and going low-wasteThe first thing you notice when you walk into Scisters Salon & Apothecary is what isn’t there. No wall of glossy plastic bottles promising “repair” or “shine”. No sharp chemical tang or aerosol haze. The only trash can is a tiny basket that mostly collects coffee cups and gum wrappers clients bring from home.Instead, the shelves of this southern California salon are lined with large refill containers of shampoo and conditioner, houseplants dot the space, hair clippings are swept away for compost, and the air carries a trace of bergamot and vanilla

Ministers vow to spend record £8.4bn on road maintenance in England

Ministers have pledged to spend record amounts on road maintenance as part of a £27bn five-year investment plan for England’s major roads and motorways.The government said it was aiming to “fix the foundations” with almost a third, £8.4bn, of the spending going on maintenance, including resurfacing a quarter of England’s strategic road network.However, campaigners said the plan – the government’s third road investment strategy, known as RIS3 – was still building needless new roads, with funding approved for 16 schemes.That includes £1

Ticketmaster quietly raised other fees after US crackdown on hidden charges

Following a wave of regulations banning the surprise fees that appear at the end of a transaction, Ticketmaster stopped charging the extra few dollars it added to each order at checkout. Typically shared with the venue, the order processing fee was a boon to a global platform that sells hundreds of millions of tickets a year.But documents obtained by the Guardian show that while Ticketmaster eliminated this fee to comply with the rules, the company simply raised the cost of different fees in a number of its venues to ensure it didn’t lose money.“To account for the loss of order processing revenue, we must adjust fees to offset the revenue loss,” Ticketmaster wrote in an email to the Findlay Toyota Center in Arizona last year. The venue eliminated a $6 order processing fee, but raised the service fee on each ticket by $2 instead

Co-op boss quits after year marked by cyber-attack and claims of ‘toxic’ culture

The Co-op Group has announced that its chief executive will step down this weekend after a difficult year that included a cyber-attack and recent claims of a “toxic” culture at the business.Shirine Khoury-Haq will depart on 29 March and Kate Allum, a board member and former boss of the dairy group First Milk, will step in as interim boss while a permanent replacement is sought.News of the exit came as the company, which owns more than 800 funeral parlours and an insurance and legal advisory business, as well as operating more than 2,000 convenience stores, dived to an underlying loss of £125m.The drop from a £45m profit the year before came after it took a £107m profits hit from the damaging IT hack, which forced it to shut down some systems.On Thursday, Khoury-Haq denied that her resignation was linked to the allegations of a toxic culture

Australian growth forecasts slashed as global economy faces inflation spike

The world economy is on the brink of a major inflationary spike as soaring fuel prices threaten growth in European and Asian nations, the OECD has warned, and local economists are slashing Australia’s growth prospects for this year and the next amid the ongoing US-Israel attack on Iran.The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest interim outlook said the US-Israel war on Iran will “test the resilience of the global economy” and warned of the “significant downside risk” to their forecasts should the oil supply disruptions prove more persistent and push energy prices even higher.The Paris-based organisation predicted inflation across G20 countries would reach 4% through 2026, or 1.2 percentage points higher than anticipated in December and before the US-Israeli bombing of Iran led to the closure of the strait of Hormuz.The OECD downgraded growth across the Euro area countries, the UK and South Korea by 0

Middle East conflict will damage UK’s economy ‘more than any other’

The conflict in the Middle East will damage the UK’s economy more than any other industrialised nation, according to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which warned over rising inflation.In the first major assessment by a leading international thinktank of the economic impact from the attack on Iran, the OECD said the UK economy would grow by just 0.7% this year, compared with its last forecast, made in December, of 1.2% for 2026.Illustrating the UK’s dependence on international trade and imports of fuel, the OECD said it had downgraded the UK’s growth in 2026 because it was likely to suffer higher inflation than previously expected