While in Santa Fe, any time we looked like a possible prospect at an art gallery, we were offered water (which, given Santa Fe, was quite welcome). Sometimes it was an actual glass or plastic cup of water, but more often (no doubt for convenience sake, and it was nice to be able to walk off with it) it was a bottle of water.
And at least one place we went (I really don’t recall where) we got Fiji water. Which made me do a double-take as it touted itself as, well, water from Fiji. From Fiji? “That’s crazy,” I said, as I took a nice, cool gulp.
As the Fiji flacks put it:
FIJI Water is natural artesian water bottled directly from the source—an aquifer buried deep within the ground in the remote islands of Fiji. The pure and all-natural water is untouched by man until the cap is opened. FIJI Water’s refreshing taste, “soft-mouth” feel, mineral content, and quality are directly influenced by the pristine environment prevailing at the water’s source, far from industrialized nations.
[…] FIJI® Water, bottled at an artesian aquifer in Viti Levu (Fiji islands), is the second largest imported still water brand in the United States. A product of one of the last virgin ecosystems on the planet, natural pressure forces FIJI Water out of its aquifer deep below the earth’s surface, and into its iconic square bottles through a sealed delivery system free of human contact.
Which makes this article, cited in BoingBoing, a scosh unnerving.
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.
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.
It’s “coal to Newcastle” time, paid for by relatively highly wealthy societies in a global economy — a strange paradigm for our modern world. The article actually goes into the long and bizarre history of bottled water beyond just Fiji, and … it’s unnerving. A triumph of convenience, advertising, and money.
People will buy anything. I’ll bet that, with the proper ad campaign, you could sell Moon Water.
As confirmation of my opinion, I submit this for your consideration.