jen ace,
the corporate environmentalist
Fiji: The Next Best Thing to Tap Water
Barbara Chung, Senior Manager of Sustainable Growth at Fiji Water, spoke during one of my classes last week. Fiji went down in flames pretty hard in Fast Company's bottled water article last year, and while I went in to the talk with an open mind, I couldn't see how Barbara was going to convince me that shipping drinking water in from Fiji is sustainable.
I came out of the meeting impressed with Fiji. The first point that Chung made was that comparing bottled water to tap water isn't very realistic. The bottled water market is increasing at about the same rate that the rest of the bottled beverage (ie. soda) market is declining. Further, the only part of the water-trucked-in-just-for-your-consumption market is declining is the kind where a company like Poland Spring brings a big plastic container of water to your house that sits upside down on a dispenser - the kind you might drink if you chose not to drink tap water at home. Bottled water also has a lower environmental footprint than soda because you don't have to account for the impacts associated with growing sugar and producing the other lovely chemicals in it.
drink tap water
Now I'm not most people, but I never buy bottled water. I don't have a Nalgene because I lose them too frequently; instead I buy a Diet Coke when I haven't had enough sleep and save the bottle to refill with water. I use it until I lose it, by which time I've probably had another not enough sleep day, and the cycle continues. I don't need to make a choice between bottled and tap water because I always have that Coke bottle of water strapped onto my backpack. If more people could give a moment's thought to what they might be doing during the day before they stepped out the door in the morning, perhaps fewer people would "need" to buy bottled, and a comparison between bottled and tap would be feasible. As it is, I grant the bottled water/soda comparison.
sustainability?
But how can shipping water half way across the world be sustainable? It turns out that the number of miles a product travels may not be such a great indicator of sustainability. While container ships usually burn bunker oil and bunker oil is nasty stuff, container ships also carry a lot of containers for the amount of fuel that they burn. In other words, they're pretty efficient. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation on this for Yale University Press earlier this year. The Press sometimes prints books (cheaply) in China, and sends them by container ship and rail to their distribution center in Rhode Island. Sometimes they print domestically, and truck the books to Rhode Island. The Press wanted to know how much worse are the environmental impacts associated with printing in China.
It turns out it actually isn't worse - as long as the cross-US trip is by rail (as it is with the Press), printing in China has less of an environmental impact associated with transportation than printing anywhere in the US that's further away from Rhode Island than Illinois (lack of environmental regulations in China may mean that printing chemicals are more likely to get discharged into the trash or into waterways than they are in the U.S., but that's another story). Until recently, Fiji was a net importer of goods, so container ships would take cars, fertilizer, and the like over there and then leave empty. Now they leave with cases of Fiji Water. The incremental environmental impact of transportation is thus virtually nil, although Fiji Water does account for transportation impacts as if a special trip was being made. The company currently offsets 120% of the carbon footprint associated with a bottle of water, so each bottle actually has a negative footprint.
As far as the water itself - it rains a lot in Fiji. About 100 inches a year. According to Chung, most of this water would end up in the ocean if Fiji Water wasn't bottling it. I'm not an expert on water sources, so I can't verify whether this is true, but it seems possible.
at least it’s not from fiji...
Another chapter of this story began this morning during the opening keynote address of the Net Impact conference. John Brock, CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises (CCE) and Carter Roberts, President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund were being (lightly) grilled on their partnership by Marc Gunther, a writer at Fortune magazine. Brock and Roberts were congratulating each other on the great strides they've made to reduce water waste at CCE, when Gunther drew attention to the elephant in the room: the bottles of Dasani water on the table in front of them. Roberts picked it up, mock-examined it, and said rather flippantly "Well, at least it's not from Fiji...".
CCE is based in Atlanta, where it doesn't rain a lot. In fact, 2007 narrowly missed being the driest year on record for the city - cumulative 2007 rainfall was 30.85 inches, just a hair over the record 30.80 inches recorded in 1954. Atlanta is draining its major water source - Lake Lanier - at such an alarming rate that there's a blog just dedicated to the water shortage in that city alone. The state of Georgia is considering reopening a 190-year old boundary dispute with Tennessee, which would give Georgia access to some of the flow in the Tennessee River. As it is, Georgia, Florida and Alabama have been involved in a legal dispute over flows out of the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint River Basin (into which Lake Lanier drains) for over a decade - Georgia wants more drinking water, and doesn't want to have to send water downstream just to keep the rivers navigable and the oysters growing in the Apalachicola Bay. Given that this is an extremely water stressed region, it seems possible that the environmental impacts of withdrawing large quantities of drinking water to make Coke and bottled water (since Dasani - Coke's main water brand - is essentially purified tap water) exceed those of shipping bottles of Fiji Water from Fiji. Nobody knows for sure, because while Fiji Water has publicly released data on its operations, CCE views this information as proprietary. WWF could conduct the study using CCE's private data and Fiji Water's publicly available data, but then they might have to say that domestically-produced bottled water isn't so green after all. And nobody wants that.
So, tap water is best. But until CCE releases some data that allows someone to conduct a comparative life cycle analysis, Fiji Water may be a decent alternative.
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the blog: fiji water
