green lies
i’ve noticed more and more recently how when you start looking for something, you see it all over the place.
anyway, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, one of the things that’s been at the top of my mind for a while is greenwashing, and so now i see it everywhere. on the plus side, it’s great that so many companies are finally realizing that they need to be (or at least promote themselves as) environmentally conscious and hopefully that eventually leads to real change, but so much of it is just pure advertising spin and not actual corporate change, and when you see it, it makes you sort of ill. i was reading NPR news this morning, and saw a little ad for Fiji water on the righthand column, directing you to their website “Fiji Green”. bottled water is a huge no-no among environmentalists, and now that everyone is so carbon calculator obsessed, bottled water FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD is especially seen as overly decadent. so Fiji water has attempted to ‘green’ their image by claiming that the ‘food miles’ calculation is a myth, based on the recent New Yorker article that pointed out some of the unexpected results when you really tabulate all the factors from production to shipping to consumption.
We here at FIJI Water hear a lot of complaints about “food miles,” ours in particular. The concept is that the longer your food travels, the worse it is for the environment.
We think this is a load of hooey…and so do scientists who have studied lifecycle carbon footprints. The key word here is lifecycle – how a product is developed or packaged, what the transport mode is, and other factors can have a far greater impact for better or worse than the mere distance traveled.
this is the real kicker:
There are still people who are choosing to “buy/eat local” and thereby actually making their environmental impact worse than it otherwise would have been.
WTF – bashing the “buy/eat local” movement?! Fiji gets a tiny bit of credit for engaging this issue with open public comments on the blog and everything, but i think this one scores pretty high on the greenwashing index.
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