In my last posting, I wrote about recycling efforts in our community (”vanua”) in Fiji. Now Molly, our Culture and Community Affairs Coordinator, will share more about her experiences in the local villages. Take it away, Molly…

Ni Bula Vinaka to everyone from sunny Fiji - sunny now that cyclone season is over, that is. Before I started my work here at FIJI Water, I was based in rural Fijian communities for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps Environmental Volunteer, so I have some experience in Fijian waste management. Given that, I’m really thrilled with the progress we’ve made in a short time with these fairly simple initiatives.

It’s pretty exciting to be on the cutting edge of recycling here in Fiji, because for the most part, we’re working with a blank slate. Most rural families naturally practice reducing and reusing as a money-saving devices, craftily turning one person’s trash into another’s treasure. Gunny sacks and fabric scraps are sewn into throw rugs, tires are made into swings and planters, and glass and plastic bottles become handy containers.

When it comes time to disposal however, our work in the vanua has the potential to change the way our communities think about their recyclables. Just last weekend I participated in our local women’s netball club weekly tournament, as part of the FIJI Water employee team. 

Cartons of FIJI Water were everywhere, and bottles were swigged greedily as we played under the hot equatorial sun. It was music to my ears, however, to hear throughout the day small children, mothers, and the other members of the team saying to each other “Recycle please, everybody.” “Don’t forget to save the bottles!” “Bring that bottle back over here, we can recycle it.” They said it in Fijian, of course, so forgive the rough translations, but I was elated to find that the message is catching on, and that I am no longer the lonely broken record. 

Meanwhile at the plant, employees are regularly coming up to me at my desk to boast about all the bottles they return in a week. You’d think I was giving out gold stars! Recycling updates are part of our weekly staff meeting, and departments are lined up against one another and challenged to improve their participation in the program.

We also had a visit last week from the Vatukaloko Jr. Secondary School as they ran the round-the-island torch up to the factory as a prelude to the nationwide secondary school athletics meet in Suva. They ran in the uniforms they had earned through a month-long recycling drive held at the school, and as they prepare to compete, they can have pride knowing that FIJI Water is 100% behind them.

It can be a challenge to establish new habits for a people who, even just 100 years ago, were using all natural, biodegradable materials for all of their everyday needs. Snacks which were once wrapped in banana leaves that could be recklessly discarded, now come in plastic wrappers and tins. The best tool we have is education, and to call upon people who live in a tiny corner of the planet to think of the larger picture. Bottle by bottle, we are doing our part to make Fiji a cleaner, greener place.

First things first: What is a “vanua”?

“Vanua” is the Fijian word for “community.” There are six villages that comprise the vanua in the region from which FIJI Water comes: Drauniivi, Togovere, Rabulu, Naseyani, Nananu, and the small settlement of Navunitivi.

As we too are part of the vanua, we work with the community in several ways in addition to our role as an employer, e.g., building and sponsoring schools, developing water access infrastructure, supporting local health clinics and more.

On the environmental front, this work includes recycling education and sponsorship. Our efforts have included:

• Providing a free case of product to FIJI Water employees at the bottling facility in return for every case’s worth of bottles they bring in, along with the usual weekly provision of one free case per employee.
• Conducting a recycling drive at the secondary school in Drauniivi. Students brought in aluminum cans, FIJI Water bottles, and other PET bottles to raise money for their school track uniforms. We’re looking at extending similar efforts on an ongoing basis, to encourage a habit of recycling and benefit local schools.
• Sponsoring the eight local women’s netball clubs in a clean up drive, and in return providing new balls for the clubs and trophies for their annual awards ceremony.
• Planning to situate outdoors recycling stations at the plant, local villages, and nearby towns, to serve as collection centers for recyclables.

Molly, our Culture and Community Affairs Coordinator, has been one of the driving forces behind these efforts and many other ways in which we serve the community. In our next blog posting, she’ll share more about recycling education efforts in Fiji.

I’m feeling inspired after spending last week in Fiji. Fiji, of course, is so beautiful that it’s always inspiring. On top of this, the team at the bottling facility is doing some fantastic work to reduce our carbon footprint and improve recycling rates in our local community. They encouraged me tremendously, so I’d like to share some of their stories with you over the next few postings.

Let’s start with recycling at the bottling facility. Paul, our Director of Production Operations & Engineering, has been hard at work over the past year and a half figuring out how to recycle manufacturing waste materials. Thanks to his efforts and those of our recycling partners in Australia, we’ve reduced by 70% the amount of manufacturing waste taken to landfills. Paul’s ultimate goal is for the FIJI Water plant to become a “zero waste” facility, meaning we will reduce, reuse, or recycle all waste.

At first Paul started with plastic and cardboard, for which there are many eager buyers already. Not content with that, however, Paul and the team persisted and found buyers for lab coats, shoe covers, hair nets, pallet strapping, bulk bags and drums, empty spools, and more. (Who knew you could recycle this kind of stuff too?)

When looking for buyers to take the recyclables, Paul simply asks that they pay enough to cover the cost of transportation. With popular materials like PET, however, he can usually get more. So he’s taken the money earned and reinvested it into the recycling infrastructure at the plant. This helps us recycle more materials and do so more efficiently. The bottling facility is now capable of recycling not only its own waste, but also recyclable materials brought in by local residents from their villages and towns. This is important because there is no other recycling infrastructure available to the local community.

In case you are wondering whether the greenhouse gas emissions from transporting recyclable materials to buyers are worth the effort to recycle, here are the numbers from our base year.

• Emissions created by transporting recyclables: 13 tonnes CO2eq
• Emissions avoided by recycling materials instead of producing new ones: 619 tonnes CO2eq

The net impact is an emissions reduction of 606 tonnes CO2eq, having the same effect as taking 111 passenger vehicles off the road for a year or planting over 15,000 trees.

This works on an individual level too. Every time you recycle the packaging for anything you use - food and beverage, for example - you reduce its carbon footprint. Play our recycling game to learn how this works!

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.

The New Yorker recently published an article about carbon footprints that, among other things, summarized major scientific studies on “food miles.” These studies have shown:

• Apples imported from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can have a lower carbon footprint than apples raised fifty miles away. Adrian Williams of the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England, explains: “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity.” This means you get more good apples per acre, and the manmade energy required to grow the crop is therefore lower. New Zealand also has many renewable energy sources with little or no carbon impact.
• Lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped to England has one-fourth the carbon footprint of lamb raised and consumed in England. Lambs in New Zealand feed on pastures that generally require less fertilizer than grazing land in the U.K., and fertilizer has a big carbon impact.
• Importing beans from Uganda or Kenya to Europe is less carbon-intensive than growing beans in Europe. The farms in Uganda and Kenya are small, rarely use tractors, and fertilize the crop with manure, while European farms often require energy-dependent irrigation systems.
• Roses shipped from Holland to England have a seed-to-store carbon footprint six times that of roses air freighted from Kenya. That’s because the Dutch roses almost always are grown in greenhouses, which use lots of energy.

And here’s an example closer to home for us: We used to send product to New York by ship from Fiji to Los Angeles, then truck from Los Angeles to the East Coast. Now we send the product by ship through the Panama Canal to Philadelphia or Newark, then truck to New York - a route that covers 50% more miles, but reduces emissions by 55%. This is because ocean freight causes 85% less emissions than trucking. Had we used food miles as a metric, we would never have made this change.

The real problem with the “food miles” concept is that it misleads people who are genuinely trying to make ethical decisions. 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. It’s unfair to them and to the environment. Of course, it’s hard for people to make the right decisions unless they have the right information, which is why it’s so important for companies to publish the full lifecycle carbon footprints of their products.

ELLE Magazine has recognized FIJI Water in its annual green issue with an ELLE 2008 Green Award! We were hailed - alongside other recipients like Brad Pitt, the Energy Action Coalition and Paul and Stella McCartney - as one of the “people, products and concepts that put energy, and our planet, in the right place.” They highlighted the fact that FIJI Water is “carbon negative – not neutral – this year,” and spoke about our commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the bottling and shipping process, to preserve the Fijian rainforest, and to minimize packaging.

Take a look at what the other award winners are doing too. It’s so inspiring!

Our Senior VP Sustainable Growth, Thomas Mooney, recently spoke with Sustainable Life Media. In this interview, Thomas explains how we’re planning to fulfill the FIJI Green promise and answers the criticism that “bottled water” and “sustainable” don’t belong in the same sentence. You can read the interview here or listen here.

Last November, FIJI Water promised to reduce its carbon footprint by 25% by 2010. In the past few months, we’ve taken a number of steps toward that goal:

• We’ve started producing the 1.5 L product with an initial 7% reduction in packaging.
• We’ve reduced by 70% the amount of manufacturing waste materials taken to landfills.
• We’re using more fuel-efficient trucks in Fiji to transport the product from plant to port, resulting in a 50% reduction in fuel usage.
• By optimizing our logistics, we’ve reduced trucking miles from warehouses to distributors by 26% on average.

These changes reflect a lot of hard work and initiative on the part of many people throughout the company, especially our operations and logistics teams. We look forward to sharing more good news like this over the coming months.

Today we announced our carbon footprint and reported on our progress to date toward fulfilling the promise of FIJI Green. We’re thinking of this as FIJI Green’s first “annual report,” even though it’s all online and not a big book. (And we’ll update you more than once a year – that’s what this blog is for!)

Why does this matter? We believe consumers will make environmentally responsible purchasing decisions if they have the information they need. The trouble is that they often don’t have this information. It’s like trying to tackle the obesity epidemic by removing nutrition labels from food and beverage products – that doesn’t make any sense, and neither does trying to tackle climate change without giving consumers the carbon footprints of the products they eat, drink, and use.

We hope that companies in our industry and beyond will provide comparable lifecycle carbon footprints for their products, so that we can all work together to address the issue of climate change. In this spirit, we have become the first privately held company ever to join the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. The CDP is the world’s largest investor coalition on climate change and has been the leader over the past several years in working with companies to disclose their carbon footprints. We will work with the CDP to disclose our carbon footprint and encourage our suppliers to do the same.

Hi everyone, welcome to our blog! We’re excited about starting this up and look forward to sharing with you the latest news on FIJI Green, our path to sustainability. We’ll talk about our day-to-day wins and struggles, neat stuff we’re learning along the way, and opportunities for you to get involved.

And we want to hear from you! Please share your thoughts on FIJI Green, what we’re doing, what we have planned…all of it. Feel free to ask questions too – we know topics like carbon footprints and climate change can get pretty complicated, and we’ll do our best to make them a bit easier to understand.