On 7/9/07, Christopher Hickman <tophu@xxxxxxx> wrote:
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/GoingGreen/story?id=3351812&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
This has (rightly) got a lot of publicity lately.
Make sure you watch the hilarious video "The truth about bottled
water" at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPAjUvvnIc
And there is another excellent article, "Message in a Bottle", which
I'll paste in below, at
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle_Printer_Friendly.html
--
"If you give Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox."
-Christopher Hitchens
Message in a Bottle
Americans spent more money last year on bottled water than on ipods or
movie tickets: $15 Billion. A journey into the economics--and
psychology--of an unlikely business boom. And what it says about our
culture of indulgence.
From: Issue 117 | July 2007 | Page 110 | By: Charles Fishman
Feedback: fishman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The largest bottled-water factory in North America is located on the
outskirts of Hollis, Maine. In the back of the plant stretches the
staging area for finished product: 24 million bottles of Poland Spring
water. As far as the eye can see, there are double-stacked pallets
packed with half-pint bottles, half-liters, liters, "Aquapods" for
school lunches, and 2.5-gallon jugs for the refrigerator.
Really, it is a lake of Poland Spring water, conveniently celled off
in plastic, extending across 6 acres, 8 feet high. A week ago, the
lake was still underground; within five days, it will all be gone, to
supermarkets and convenience stores across the Northeast, replaced by
another lake's worth of bottles.
Looking at the piles of water, you can have only one thought:
Americans sure are thirsty.
Bottled water has become the indispensable prop in our lives and our
culture. It starts the day in lunch boxes; it goes to every meeting,
lecture hall, and soccer match; it's in our cubicles at work; in the
cup holder of the treadmill at the gym; and it's rattling around
half-finished on the floor of every minivan in America. Fiji Water
shows up on the ABC show Brothers & Sisters; Poland Spring cameos
routinely on NBC's The Office. Every hotel room offers bottled water
for sale, alongside the increasingly ignored ice bucket and drinking
glasses. At Whole Foods, the upscale emporium of the organic and
exotic, bottled water is the number-one item by units sold.
Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the
United States. Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water,
Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie
tickets--$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.
Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We--a generation
raised on tap water and water fountains--drink a billion bottles of
water a week, and we're raising a generation that views tap water with
disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We've come to pay good
money--two or three or four times the cost of gasoline--for a product
we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our
homes.
When we buy a bottle of water, what we're often buying is the bottle
itself, as much as the water. We're buying the convenience--a bottle
at the 7-Eleven isn't the same product as tap water, any more than a
cup of coffee at Starbucks is the same as a cup of coffee from the
Krups machine on your kitchen counter. And we're buying the artful
story the water companies tell us about the water: where it comes
from, how healthy it is, what it says about us. Surely among the
choices we can make, bottled water isn't just good, it's positively
virtuous.
Except for this: Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and
despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence.
We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships,
trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy
equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3
pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with
bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)
Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe
drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most
fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to
us an array of water "varieties" from around the globe, not one of
which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact
that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring
water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to
people who really are thirsty.
A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is
the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It
acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our
token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely
on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it's just a bottle of water--modest
compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole
industry grows up around supplying us with something we don't
need--when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the
presentation--it's worth asking how that happened, and what the impact
is. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business
back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more
bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote
everywhere suggest.
In the town of San Pellegrino Terme, Italy, for example, is a spigot
that runs all the time, providing San Pellegrino water free to the
local citizens--except the free Pellegrino has no bubbles. Pellegrino
trucks in the bubbles for the bottling plant. The man who first
brought bottled water to the United States famously failed an
impromptu taste test involving his own product. In Maine, there is a
marble temple to honor our passion for bottled water.
And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million
bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today,
while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable
drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in
Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing
Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.
At the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills, where the rooms start at $500
a night and the guest next door might well be an Oscar winner, the
minibar in all 196 rooms contains six bottles of Fiji Water. Before
Fiji Water displaced Evian, Diet Coke was the number-one-selling
minibar item. Now, says Christian Boyens, the Peninsula's elegant
director of food and beverage, "the 1 liter of Fiji Water is number
one. Diet Coke is number two. And the 500-milliliter bottle of Fiji is
number three."
Being the water in the Peninsula minibar is so desirable--not just for
the money to be made, but for the exposure with the Peninsula's
clientele--that Boyens gets a sales call a week from a company trying
to dislodge Fiji.
Boyens, who has an MBA from Cornell, used to be indifferent to water.
Not anymore. His restaurants and bars carry 20 different waters.
"Sometimes a guest will ask for Poland Spring, and you can't get
Poland Spring in California," he says. So what does he do? "We'll call
the Peninsula in New York and have them FedEx out a case.
"I thought water was water. But our customers know what they want."
The marketing of bottled water is subtle compared with the marketing
of, say, soft drinks or beer. The point of Fiji Water in the minibar
at the Peninsula, or at the center of the table in a white-tablecloth
restaurant, is that guests will try it, love it, and buy it at a store
the next time they see it.
Which isn't difficult, because the water aisle in a suburban
supermarket typically stocks a dozen brands of water--not including
those enhanced with flavors or vitamins or, yes, oxygen. In 1976, the
average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water a year, according
to Beverage Marketing Corp. Last year, we each drank 28.3 gallons of
bottled water--18 half-liter bottles a month. We drink more bottled
water than milk, or coffee, or beer. Only carbonated soft drinks are
more popular than bottled water, at 52.9 gallons annually.
No one has experienced this transformation more profoundly than Kim
Jeffery. Jeffery began his career in the water business in the Midwest
in 1978, selling Perrier ("People didn't know whether to put it in
their lawn mower or drink it," he says). Now he's the CEO of Nestlé
Waters North America, in charge of U.S. sales of Perrier, San
Pellegrino, Poland Spring, and a portfolio of other regional natural
springwaters. Combined, his brands will sell some $4.5 billion worth
of water this year (generating roughly $500 million in pretax profit).
Jeffery insists that unlike the soda business, which is stoked by
imaginative TV and marketing campaigns, the mainstream water business
is, quite simply, "a force of nature."
"The entire bottled-water business today is half the size of the
carbonated beverage industry," says Jeffery, "but our marketing budget
is 15% of what they spend. When you put a bottle of water in that cold
box, it's the most thirst-quenching beverage there is. There's nothing
in it that's not good for you. People just know that intuitively.
"A lot of people tell me, you guys have done some great marketing to
get customers to pay for water," Jeffery says. "But we aren't that
smart. We had to have a hell of a lot of help from the consumer."
Still, we needed help learning to drink bottled water. For that, we
can thank the French.
Gustave Leven was the chairman of Source Perrier when he approached an
American named Bruce Nevins in 1976. Nevins was working for the
athletic-wear company Pony. Leven was a major Pony investor. "He
wanted me to consider the water business in the U.S.," Nevins says. "I
was a bit reluctant." Back then, the American water industry was small
and fusty, built on home and office delivery of big bottles and
grocery sales of gallon jugs.
Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more
than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.
Nevins looked out across 1970s America, though, and had an epiphany:
Perrier wasn't just water. It was a beverage. The opportunity was in
persuading people to drink Perrier when they would otherwise have had
a cocktail or a Coke. Americans were already drinking 30 gallons of
soft drinks each a year, and the three-martini lunch was increasingly
viewed as a problem. Nevins saw a niche.
From the start, Nevins pioneered a three-part strategy. First, he
connected bottled water to exclusivity: In 1977, just before Perrier's
U.S. launch, he flew 60 journalists to France to visit "the source"
where Perrier bubbled out of the ground. He connected Perrier to
health, sponsoring the New York City Marathon, just as long-distance
running was exploding as a fad across America. And he associated
Perrier with celebrity, launching with $4 million in TV commercials
featuring Orson Welles. It worked. In 1978, its first full year in the
United States, Perrier sold $20 million of water. The next year, sales
tripled to $60 million.
What made Perrier distinctive was that it was a sparkling water,
served in a signature glass bottle. But that's also what left the door
open for Evian, which came to the United States in 1984. Evian's U.S.
marketing was built around images of toned young men and women in
tight clothes sweating at the gym. Madonna drank Evian--often onstage
at concerts. "If you were cool, you were drinking bottled water," says
Ed Slade, who became Evian's vice president of marketing in 1990. "It
was a status symbol."
Evian was also a still water, which Americans prefer; and it was the
first to offer a plastic bottle nationwide. The clear bottle allowed
us to see the water--how clean and refreshing it looked on the shelf.
Americans have never wanted water in cans, which suggest a tinny
aftertaste before you take a sip. The plastic bottle, in fact, did for
water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an
anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we
wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time.
Perrier and Evian launched the bottled-water business just as it would
prove irresistible. Convenience and virtue aligned. Two-career
families, overprogrammed children, prepared foods in place of
home-cooked meals, the constant urging to eat more healthfully and
drink less alcohol--all reinforce the value of bottled water. But
those trends also reinforce the mythology.
We buy bottled water because we think it's healthy. Which it is, of
course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending
machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier
choice. But bottled water isn't healthier, or safer, than tap water.
Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the
world's $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the
top four--the others are Brazil, China, and Mexico--that has
universally reliable tap water. Tap water in this country, with rare
exceptions, is impressively safe. It is monitored constantly, and the
test results made public. Mineral water has a long association with
medicinal benefits--and it can provide minerals that people need--but
there are no scientific studies establishing that routinely consuming
mineral water improves your health. The FDA, in fact, forbids mineral
waters in the United States from making any health claims.
If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water
costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
And for this healthy convenience, we're paying what amounts to an
unbelievable premium. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17
ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water
seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite
National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to
filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill
that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San
Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another
way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water
costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
Taste, of course, is highly personal. New Yorkers excepted, Americans
love to belittle the quality of their tap water. But in blind taste
tests, with waters at equal temperatures, presented in identical
glasses, ordinary people can rarely distinguish between tap water,
springwater, and luxury waters. At the height of Perrier's popularity,
Bruce Nevins was asked on a live network radio show one morning to
pick Perrier from a lineup of seven carbonated waters served in paper
cups. It took him five tries.
We are actually in the midst of a second love affair with bottled
water. In the United States, many of the earliest, still-familiar
brands of springwater--Poland Spring, Saratoga Springs, Deer Park,
Arrowhead--were originally associated with resort and spa complexes.
The water itself, pure at a time when cities struggled to provide safe
water, was the source of the enterprise.
In the late 1800s, Poland Spring was already a renowned brand of
healthful drinking water that you could get home-delivered in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago. It was also a sprawling summer
resort complex, with thousands of guests and three Victorian hotels,
some of which had bathtubs with spigots that allowed guests to bathe
in Poland Spring water. The resort burned in 1976, but at the crest of
a hill in Poland Spring, Maine, you can still visit a
marble-and-granite temple built in 1906 to house the original spring.
24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi.
The car, the Depression, World War II, and perhaps most important,
clean, safe municipal water, unwound the resorts and the first wave of
water as business. We had to wait two generations for the second,
which would turn out to be much different--and much larger.
Today, for all the apparent variety on the shelf, bottled water is
dominated in the United States and worldwide by four huge companies.
Pepsi has the nation's number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina,
with 13% of the market. Coke's Dasani is number two, with 11% of the
market. Both are simply purified municipal water--so 24% of the
bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our
convenience. Evian is owned by Danone, the French food giant, and
distributed in the United States by Coke.
The really big water company in the United States is Nestlé, which
gradually bought up the nation's heritage brands, and expanded them.
The waters are slightly different--springwater must come from actual
springs, identified specifically on the label--but together, they add
up to 26% of the market, according to Beverage Marketing, surpassing
Coke and Pepsi's brands combined.
Since most water brands are owned by larger companies, it's hard to
get directly at the economics. But according to those inside the
business, half the price of a typical $1.29 bottle goes to the
retailer. As much as a third goes to the distributor and transport.
Another 12 to 15 cents is the cost of the water itself, the bottle and
the cap. That leaves roughly a dime of profit. On multipacks, that
profit is more like 2 cents a bottle.
As the abundance in the supermarket water aisle shows, that business
is now trying to help us find new waters to drink and new occasions
for drinking them--trying to get more mouth share, as it were.
Aquafina marketing vice president Ahad Afridi says his team has done
the research to understand what kind of water drinkers we are. They've
found six types, including the "water pure-fectionist"; the "water
explorer"; the "image seeker"; and the "struggler" ("they don't really
like water that much...these are the people who have a cheeseburger
with a diet soda").
It's a startling level of thought and analysis--until you realize that
within a decade, our consumption of bottled water is expected to
surpass soda. That kind of market can't be left to chance. Aquafina's
fine segmentation is all about the newest explosion of waters that
aren't really water--flavored waters, enhanced waters, colored waters,
water drinks branded after everything from Special K breakfast cereal
to Tropicana juice.
Afridi is a true believer. He talks about water as if it were more
than a drink, more than a product--as if it were a character all its
own, a superhero ready to take the pure-fectionist, the water
explorer, and the struggler by the hand and carry them to new water
adventures. "Water as a beverage has more right to extend and enter
into more territories than any other beverage," Afridi says. "Water
has a right to travel where others can't."
Uh, meaning what?
"Water that's got vitamins in it. Water that's got some immunity-type
benefit to it. Water that helps keep skin younger. Water that gives
you energy."
Water: It's pure, it's healthy, it's perfect--and we've made it
better. The future of water sounds distinctly unlike water.
The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says "from the islands of Fiji."
Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how
extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an
18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to
Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji's two-lane King's
Highway.
Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in
reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for
the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles' journey is even
longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which
is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and
truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract
the water and bottle it.
The bubbles in San Pellegrino are extracted from volcanic springs
in Tuscany, then trucked north and injected into the water from the
source.
That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of
Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that
runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of
electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So
the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators
running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last
pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back
of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a
diesel haze.
Each water bottler has its own version of this oxymoron: that
something as pure and clean as water leaves a contrail.
San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles--so much a part of the mystique
of the water itself--weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh,
dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The
bottles are washed and rinsed, with mineral water, before being filled
with sparkling Pellegrino--it uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the
bottle for the liter we buy. The bubbles in San Pellegrino come
naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San
Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its CO2 carefully--it is
extracted from supercarbonated volcanic springwaters in Tuscany, then
trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.
Poland Spring may not have any oceans to traverse, but it still must
be trucked hundreds of miles from Maine to markets and convenience
stores across its territory in the northeast--it is 312 miles from the
Hollis plant to midtown Manhattan. Our desire for Poland Spring has
outgrown the springs at Poland Spring's two Maine plants; the company
runs a fleet of 80 silver tanker trucks that continuously crisscross
the state of Maine, delivering water from other springs to keep its
bottling plants humming.
We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--in excess
of $1 billion worth of plastic.
In transportation terms, perhaps the waters with the least
environmental impact are Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani. Both
start with municipal water. That allows the companies to use dozens of
bottling plants across the nation, reducing how far bottles must be
shipped.
Yet Coke and Pepsi add in a new step. They put the local water through
an energy-intensive reverse-osmosis filtration process more potent
than that used to turn seawater into drinking water. The water they
are purifying is ready to drink--they are recleaning perfectly clean
tap water. They do it so marketing can brag about the purity, and to
provide consistency: So a bottle of Aquafina in Austin and a bottle in
Seattle taste the same, regardless of the municipal source.
There is one more item in bottled water's environmental ledger: the
bottles themselves. The big springwater companies tend to make their
own bottles in their plants, just moments before they are filled with
water--12, 19, 30 grams of molded plastic each. Americans went through
about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person.
Durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded.
Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene
terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their
impact: Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch
into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--more than $1 billion
worth of plastic.
Some of the water companies are acutely aware that every business,
every product, every activity is under environmental scrutiny like
never before. Nestlé Waters has just redesigned its half-liter bottle,
the most popular size among the 18 billion bottles the company will
mold this year, to use less plastic. The lighter bottle and cap
require 15 grams of plastic instead of 19 grams, a reduction of 20%.
The bottle feels flimsy--it uses half the plastic of Fiji Water's
half-liter bottle--and CEO Jeffery says that crushable feeling should
be the new standard for bottled-water cachet.
"As we've rolled out the lightweight bottle, people have said, 'Well,
that feels cheap,'" says Jeffery. "And that's good. If it feels solid
like a Gatorade bottle or a Fiji bottle, that's not so good." Of
course, lighter bottles are also cheaper for Nestlé to produce and
ship. Good environmentalism equals good business.
John Mackey is the CEO and cofounder of Whole Foods Market, the
national organic-and-natural grocery chain. No one thinks about the
environmental and social impacts and the larger context of food more
incisively than Mackey--so he's a good person to help frame the
ethical questions around bottled water.
Mackey and his wife have a water filter at home, and don't typically
drink bottled water there. "If I go to a movie," he says, "I'll
smuggle in a bottle of filtered water from home. I don't want to buy a
Coke there, and why buy another bottle of water--$3 for 16 ounces?"
But he does drink bottled water at work: Whole Foods' house brand, 365
Water.
"You can compare bottled water to tap water and reach one set of
conclusions," says Mackey, referring both to environmental and social
ramifications. "But if you compare it with other packaged beverages,
you reach another set of conclusions.
"It's unfair to say bottled water is causing extra plastic in
landfills, and it's using energy transporting it," he says. "There's a
substitution effect--it's substituting for juices and Coke and Pepsi."
Indeed, we still drink almost twice the amount of soda as water--which
is, in fact, 90% water and also in containers made to be discarded. If
bottled water raises environmental and social issues, don't soft
drinks raise all those issues, plus obesity concerns?
What's different about water, of course, is that it runs from taps in
our homes, or from fountains in public spaces. Soda does not.
As for the energy used to transport water from overseas, Mackey says
it is no more or less wasteful than the energy used to bring merlot
from France or coffee from Ethiopia, raspberries from Chile or iPods
from China. "Have we now decided that the use of any fossil fuel is
somehow unethical?" Mackey asks. "I don't think water should be picked
on. Why is the iPod okay and the water is not?"
Mackey's is a merchant's approach to the issue of bottled water--it's
a choice for people to make in the market. Princeton University
philosopher Peter Singer takes an ethicist's approach. Singer has
coauthored two books that grapple specifically with the question of
what it means to eat ethically--how responsible are we for the
negative impact, even unknowing, of our food choices on the world?
"Where the drinking water is safe, bottled water is simply a
superfluous luxury that we should do without," he says. "How is it
different than French merlot? One difference is the value of the
product, in comparison to the value of transporting and packaging it.
It's far lower in the bottled water than in the wine.
"And buying the merlot may help sustain a tradition in the French
countryside that we value--a community, a way of life, a set of values
that would disappear if we stopped buying French wines. I doubt if you
travel to Fiji you would find a tradition of cultivation of Fiji
water.
"We're completely thoughtless about handing out $1 for this bottle of
water, when there are virtually identical alternatives for free. It's
a level of affluence that we just take for granted. What could you do?
Put that dollar in a jar on the counter instead, carry a water bottle,
and at the end of the month, send all the money to Oxfam or CARE and
help someone who has real needs. And you're no worse off."
Beyond culture and the product's value, Singer makes one exception.
"You know, they do import Kenyan vegetables by air into London. Fresh
peas from Kenya, sent by airplane to London. That provides employment
for people who have few opportunities to get themselves out of
poverty. So despite the fuel consumption, we're supporting a
developing country, we're working against poverty, we're working for
global equity.
"Those issues are relevant. Presumably, for instance, bottling water
in Fiji is fairly automated. But if there were 10,000 Fijians
carefully filtering the water through coconut fiber--well, that would
be a better argument for drinking it."
Marika, an elder from the Fijian village of Drauniivi, is sitting
cross-legged on a hand-woven mat before a wooden bowl, where his
weathered hands are filtering Fiji Water through a long bag of ground
kava root. Marika is making a bowl of grog, a lightly narcotic
beverage that is an anchor of traditional Fiji society. People with
business to conduct sit wearing the traditional Fijian skirt, and
drink round after round of grog, served in half a coconut shell, as
they discuss the matters at hand.
Marika is using Fiji Water--the same Fiji Water in the minibars of the
Peninsula Hotel--because Drauniivi is one of the five rural villages
near the Fiji Water bottling plant where the plant's workers live.
Drauniivi and Beverly Hills are part of the same bottled-water supply
chain.
Jim Siplon, an American who manages Fiji Water's 10-year-old bottling
plant in Fiji, has arranged the grog ceremony. "This is the soul of
Fiji Water," he says. The ceremony lasts 45 minutes and goes through
four rounds of grog, which tastes a little furry. Marika is
interrupted twice by his cell phone, which he pulls from a pocket in
his skirt. It is shift change at the plant, and Marika coordinates the
minibus network that transports villagers to and from work.
Fiji Water is the product of these villages, a South Pacific aquifer,
and a state-of-the-art bottling plant in a part of Fiji even the
locals consider remote. The plant, on the northeast coast of Fiji's
main island of Viti Levu, is a white two-story building that looks
like a 1970s-era junior high school. The entrance faces the interior
of Viti Levu and a cloud-shrouded ridge of volcanic mountains.
Inside, the plant is in almost every way indistinguishable from
Pellegrino's plant in Italy, or Poland Spring's in Hollis, filled with
computer-controlled bottle-making and bottle-filling equipment. Line
number two can spin out 1 million bottles of Fiji Water a day, enough
to load 40 20-foot shipping containers; the factory has three lines.
The plant employs 200 islanders--set to increase to 250 this
year--most with just a sixth- or eighth-grade education. Even the
entry-level jobs pay twice the informal minimum wage. But these are
more than simply jobs--they are jobs in a modern factory, in a place
where there aren't jobs of any sort beyond the villages. And the jobs
are just part of an ecosystem emerging around the plant--water-based
trickle-down economics, as it were.
Siplon, a veteran telecom manager from MCI, wants Fiji Water to feel
like a local company in Fiji. (It was purchased in 2004 by privately
owned Roll International, which also owns POM Wonderful and is one of
the largest producers of nuts in the United States.) He uses a nearby
company to print the carrying handles for Fiji Water six-packs and
buys engineering services and cardboard boxes on the island. By
long-standing arrangement, the plant has seeded a small business in
the villages that contracts with the plant to provide landscaping and
security, and runs the bus system that Marika helps manage.
In 2007, Fiji Water will mark a milestone. "Even though you can drive
for hours and hours on this island past cane fields," says Siplon,
"sometime this year, Fiji Water will eclipse sugarcane as the
number-one export." That is, the amount of sugar harvested and
processed for export by some 40,000 seasonal sugar workers will equal
in dollar value the amount of water bottled and shipped by 200 water
bottlers.
However we regard Fiji Water in the United States--essential
accessory, harmless treat, or frivolous excess--the closer you get to
the source of its water, the more significant the enterprise looks.
No, no coconut-fiber filtering, but rather, a toehold in the global
economy. Are 10,000 Fijians benefiting? Not directly. Perhaps 2,000.
But Fiji Water is providing something else to a tiny nation of 850,000
people, which has been buffeted by two coups in seven years, and the
collapse of its gold-mining and textiles industries: inspiration, a
vision of what the country might have to offer the rest of the world.
Developed countries are keen for myriad variations on just what Fiji
Water is--a pure, unadulterated, organic, and natural product. Fiji
has whole vistas of untouched, organic-ready farmland. Indeed, the
hottest topic this spring (beyond politics) was how to jump-start an
organic-sugar industry.
Of course, the irony of shipping a precious product from a country
without reliable water service is hard to avoid. This spring, typhoid
from contaminated drinking water swept one of Fiji's islands,
sickening dozens of villagers and killing at least one. Fiji Water
often quietly supplies emergency drinking water in such cases. The
reality is, if Fiji Water weren't tapping its aquifer, the underground
water would slide into the Pacific Ocean, somewhere just off the
coast. But the corresponding reality is, someone else--the Fijian
government, an NGO--could be tapping that supply and sending it
through a pipe to villagers who need it. Fiji Water has, in fact, done
just that, to some degree--20 water projects in the five nearby
villages. Indeed, Roll has reinvested every dollar of profit since
2004 back into the business and the island.
Siplon acknowledges the risk of slipping into capitalistic
neo-colonialism. "Does the world need Fiji Water?" he asks. "I'm not
sure I agree with the critics on that. This company has the potential
of delivering great value--or the results a cynic might have
expected."
Water is, in fact, often the perfect beverage--healthy, refreshing,
and satisfying in a way soda or juice aren't. A good choice.
Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking
water; 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted
water.
Nestlé Waters' Kim Jeffery may be defending his industry when he calls
bottled water "a force of nature," but he's also not wrong. Our
consumption of bottled water has outstripped any marketer's dreams or
talent: If you break out the single-serve plastic bottle as its own
category, our consumption of bottled water grew a thousandfold between
1984 and 2005.
In the array of styles, choices, moods, and messages available today,
water has come to signify how we think of ourselves. We want to brand
ourselves--as Madonna did--even with something as ordinary as a drink
of water. We imagine there is a difference between showing up at the
weekly staff meeting with Aquafina, or Fiji, or a small glass bottle
of Pellegrino. Which is, of course, a little silly.
Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice.
Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the
fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the
car cup holders--that happens because of a fundamental
thoughtlessness. It's only marginally more trouble to have reusable
water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the
fridge. We just can't be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion
people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a
day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous
consumption of bottled water that we don't need seems wasteful, and
perhaps cavalier.
That is the sense in which Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, and Singer,
the Princeton philosopher, are both right. Mackey is right that buying
bottled water is a choice, and Singer is right that given the impact
it has, the easy substitutes, and the thoughtless spending involved,
it's fair to ask whether it's always a good choice.
The most common question the U.S. employees of Fiji Water still get
is, "Does it really come from Fiji?" We're choosing Fiji Water because
of the hibiscus blossom on the beautiful square bottle, we're choosing
it because of the silky taste. We're seduced by the idea of a bottle
of water from Fiji. We just don't believe it really comes from Fiji.
What kind of a choice is that?
Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of
water, it's reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle, not
just "Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I'm about to spend?" but
"Does the value equal the impact I'm about to leave behind?"
Simply asking the question takes the carelessness out of the
transaction. And once you understand where the water comes from, and
how it got here, it's hard to look at that bottle in the same way
again.