Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [60]
The summer grinds on, the Corporate Accountability volunteers run their taste tests, and the media continue to link bottled water with global warming. No bottler is hit harder in the great carbon dustup than Fiji Water. The number two imported brand in the United States, after Evian, Fiji is pumped from an aquifer beneath a “pristine” rain forest on Viti Levu—more than a million bottles of it a day—then shipped to the United States and other ports. The company, owned by Roll International, trades on its distance from industry and pollution: remoteness makes its water “more pure” and “healthier than other bottled waters.” But that distance—more than five thousand miles to the port of San Francisco, where it is loaded onto trucks and trains for delivery to zip codes from coast to coast—has another dimension. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, shipping a million gallons of water from Fiji to New York City generates 190 tons of carbon dioxide. (The average American generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide per year.)
There’s another environmental cost to Fiji Water: the bottling plant, in need of a steady power source, runs three diesel generators twenty-four hours a day. Charles Fishman writes, in Fast Company magazine, “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.”
Away from the rain forest, Fiji’s urban areas are chronically water-stressed—not because there isn’t enough water around, but because the infrastructure to deliver and protect it is inadequate. “The population is growing, and there isn’t proper planning or pumping stations,” a functionary at the Fijian embassy in New York tells me. (Embassy employees drink neither from the tap nor from Fiji bottles but from a Poland Spring cooler.) In 2007, half the nation didn’t have access to clean water. Flash floods during the rainy season lead to outbreaks of typhoid, leptospirosis, and dengue fever. During these events, Fijians are advised to boil their water or drink from the bottle.
It makes a neat story for the antibottle crowd. Water is sent thousands of miles to people who already have clean, cheap water (us), while locals at the source go thirsty. But will boycotting Fiji Water help the Fijians? No, and there’s evidence it would actually cause hardship. Roll has reinvested all its profits since 2004 into the business and the island. It built schools for its workers’ children and puts money into a trust for water infrastructure. The company employs more than three hundred Fijians, paying them twice the informal minimum wage. Boycott Fiji Water and a burgeoning local economy will falter, even as the air quality near the plant—and everywhere Fiji’s ships and trucks roam—improves. In Fiji, as in Fryeburg, nothing’s simple.
The mayors who canceled their bottled-water contracts in the summer of 2007 burnished their eco-cred, but their primary motivation may have been fiscal. Buying water is expensive; so is collecting bottles and delivering them to dumps. Most U.S. communities can recycle the empties, but because most bottled water is consumed in places that often lack recycling bins—on the street, in movie theaters, at parks, and on the road—the product has a pitiful recovery rate: barely 15 percent. Most single-serve bottles are either buried in landfills or burned in incinerators, or they make their way to the far corners of the earth: blown underneath train platforms, into the back of caves and alleys, along roadways, onto beaches, and out to the middle of the ocean, where the containers break into tiny pieces that sea creatures mistake for food.
As the prices of oil and natural gas rise, plastic becomes more valuable. Processors in the