Hi everyone! I know I haven’t posted in ages…my apologies! I’ve been unusually busy and short on time the past few weeks.

It all started when my microwave stopped working three weeks ago. I suppose it was due…it was quite old. However, it was part of a microwave-oven combined unit, and the oven still works great. So I didn’t want to replace the microwave, because that would also mean replacing a perfectly good oven. And the prospect of sending a good oven to landfill - or even recycling - was just too much for my devoted green heart to bear.

Because I’m usually busy, I try to save time on cooking dinner during the week by making a big meal one night and then microwaving leftovers for another night or two. I like to dress up the leftovers with freshly sauteed vegetables, grated cheese, or something else quick and easy. Without a microwave, I figured I should cook smaller meals each night, just enough to eat for that night, then start from scratch the next day. (I’ve tried reheating leftovers on the stove before, but the food kept getting overcooked.)

It was certainly nice to eat a freshly prepared dinner every night…but after a week I just couldn’t handle the time sink any more. So I decided to just eat a good breakfast and lunch each day, and not eat dinner any more unless I was out with family and friends. Hey, that could help me lose weight too, and who doesn’t want to lose a few pounds? And I could use the extra time to catch up on everything I’d fallen behind on (like this blog!) during the Week of Freshly Prepared Dinners.

Filled with hope and good intentions, I launched my new dinner-less resolution. But I don’t like the feeling of overeating at any meal, so I’d eat a normal, moderate breakfast and lunch, and then when “dinnertime” rolled around, I’d be pretty hungry. As it got later in the evening, I’d be sooooo hungry. Oh, it was painful. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when even a piece of chocolate isn’t satisfying.

So I started going to bed earlier and earlier to avoid feeling hungry…in bed by 8:30 pm or 9 pm, and up by 5 am. You’d think I’d at least be able to catch up on my life in those spare morning hours, right? Nope. Whether it’s running errands, or working, or whatever, most businesses and services aren’t open that early. So I’d spend a lovely few hours working in my garden…and falling further behind on everything I needed to get done. Or - like last night - I’d hang out late with friends, then forget to reset my alarm and still wake up at 5 am, and stumble sleepily through the rest of the day. (And the blog continued to languish.)

I was explaining this to a co-worker (who noted my sleepy expression), and he pointed out that I’d reduced my carbon footprint over the past couple of weeks by not cooking, eating, or getting a new microwave. I’d saved energy by not cooking, avoided emissions from food production by not eating, and saved money and energy by not buying a microwave. That put a smile on my sleepy face.

To make a rough estimate of the emissions I’ve avoided: A week’s worth of dinner for me - back when I had a microwave - might have looked like this with a glass of wine every night:

• Monday: Grill 8 oz organic steak, eat half of it with a baked potato and steamed broccoli. (I usually offset the healthiness of the broccoli by putting generous amounts of sour cream or butter on the potato.)
• Tuesday: Go vegetarian and make daal, a curried lentil soup. (Takes me back to Fiji where this is a staple dish.)
• Wednesday: Slice leftover steak thinly, pile onto toasted ciabatta bread, add grated Havarti cheese, and reheat, then top with freshly sauteed button mushrooms and Vidalia onions. (Heaven. You gotta try this.)
• Thursday: Microwave leftover daal. (It’s almost the end of the week, I’m keeping it simple.)
• Friday: Eat a serving of sushi. (Happiness.)

Okay, I had too much fun writing that menu. I love to eat. But I’m sleepy so I’m going to keep the calculations simple. Let’s say I eat the steak and fish and drink the wine, but pretend the non-meat stuff has no carbon footprint. (Vegetarian options often do have a lower carbon footprint.)

An 8 oz conventional steak results in about 8,300 g CO2eq across its lifecycle, and an 8 oz organic steak causes about 4,980 g CO2eq. Sushi-grade tuna, during the summer months, results in about 1,120 g CO2eq per 3 oz serving. And a bottle of wine causes about 2,650 g CO2eq and holds about 5 glasses.

So 4,980 (steak) + 1,120 (tuna) + 2,650 (wine) = 8,750 g CO2eq per week from the food and wine’s footprints alone. And 3 minutes in the microwave means about 30 g CO2eq, so if I’m reheating stuff twice a week, that adds another 60 g CO2eq. So I’m avoiding at least 8,810 g CO2eq per week in my dinner-less state…and definitely more, since I’m not counting emissions from cooking or turning on my kitchen lights, or the lifecycle carbon footprints of the potato, sour cream, broccoli, lentils, ciabatta, cheese, mushrooms, onions, rice, nori (seaweed), herbs and spices.

At this rate, in a year I’d avoid about 0.5 tonne CO2eq (8,810 g CO2eq/week * 52 weeks * 1 tonne / 1,000,000 g). According to Conservation International’s carbon footprint calculator, my annual carbon footprint is 8.2 tonnes. So if I can keep skipping dinner for a year, I’ll cut my carbon footprint by at least 5%! Not as big a reduction as I’d like, but every little bit counts.

So what do you think? Should I replace the microwave-oven unit? Buy a new standalone microwave…and a new microwave cart to put it on? Sponge free meals off my neighbors? Go out to eat every night and support local businesses? Just keep on skipping dinner and going to sleep at 8:30 pm? Do you have tips on how to reheat food on the stove successfully? Discuss!

On April 26th, St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco held the ”Discarded to Divine“ gala, an eco-friendly fashion show and charity fundraiser. Kim, our Northern California events coordinator, recruited designers Elaine O’Malley and Lisa Anne Fullerton to create a dress made from 100% recycled and reused materials, including FIJI Water packaging, for a model to wear throughout the evening.

Here, Elaine and Lisa explain the amazing creative process that led to the design of the dress…

Creating the Fiji Water dress was a great creative experiment for both of us. When we were approached by Fiji Water, we were extremely excited to take on such a remarkable challenge, and especially inspired by Fiji Water’s commitment to the environment, and our own part in bringing this fantastic idea to life!

We began coming up with different design concepts early on, creating sketches and idea boards, based on the current trends in fashion, and our own imagination of how we could transform plastic water bottles into a wearable garment. Everything changed when we received our first shipment of raw materials from Fiji, and one concept sketch stood out, as the most viable way to use our newly discovered creative tools.

We began opening boxes, and simply experimenting. There were rolls of labeling stickers, bottle caps, plastic shrink wrap, even bags of plastic resins that they melt down to create the actual Fiji bottle! We had also been drinking Fiji Water quite liberally at the time, and had acquired quite a collection of empty bottles to play with. Ideas flowed as we toyed with pleating the rolls of labeling, and cutting circular sequin shapes out of our leftover plastic bottles, and the Fiji Water dress was born!

In addition to the raw materials provided by Fiji Water, we also used two innovative textiles to help create the base of our garment. PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) is a textile made from 100% plastic PET bottles, and has the potential to keep almost three billion plastic PET bottles out of the world’s landfills each year and provide a great alternative way to contribute to a healthier environment. We also used a new innovation of polyester, which has been recycled from old polyester clothing that is broken down and then re-woven into new fabric. Between these two amazing recycled textile resources and the raw materials from Fiji, we were able to recycle and reuse in new and unusual ways to create a fantastic and fun garment.

We created the garment in less than two weeks, with very few solid hours of work time, as we are both working designers. However, our collective inspiration and fabulous teamwork was enough to get us through the bumpy road of sewing through plastic, and renegade pattern-drafting techniques, and our end result was a flirty, fun, one of a kind, “enviro-tastic” Fiji Water dress!!!

As we’ve mentioned before, FIJI Water is advocating for expansion of container deposit laws. The evidence shows that they boost recycling rates. But some bottle bills work better than others, and as with most things in life there’s always room for improvement no matter how good you are. So we’d love to hear your thoughts on what would make a good container deposit law - or for that matter, what makes a bad one.

Here are some facts about what container deposit laws do well:

• The 11 states in the U.S. that have such laws account for 60% of recycling activity in the nation. Michigan, with a 10-cent deposit, has recycling rates close to 100%.
• The deposit amounts are sufficient to motivate people to recycle, but not so high as to make prices prohibitive.
• Customers who purchase recycled plastics, such as carpet manufacturers, have found that bottle bill states provide better quality material. With deposit laws, people sort plastics more carefully so there’s less contamination from non-recyclables or between different types of plastic.

But there are also some issues with current bottle bills. To name a few:

• We think an incentive program should cover all recyclable materials. The point is to improve recycling rates and reduce what goes to landfill, right? But the materials currently subject to container deposit laws form an odd hodgepodge. Several bills cover soft drinks but not bottled water. Many bills don’t cover non-beverage containers, such as shampoo bottles or food jars. The California bill covers water bottles and beer cans, but not wine bottles or “100% fruit juice in containers 46 ounces or more.” (You’d think it would be easy to subject wine bottles to a deposit - wine is pricey enough that another 5-10¢ won’t make a difference, even if you’re buying Two-Buck Chuck. And a big juice bottle has more plastic or glass than a small juice bottle, so isn’t it even more important to recycle? But I digress…)
• Who should keep the unclaimed deposits? Distributors often pay much of the cost of managing a container return system, so they may want to lay claim to these funds to help make up the costs. But some states argue that unclaimed deposits represent “abandoned property” and therefore belong to the state.
• What type of container return infrastructure is best? Some states collect containers via retailers, others through redemption centers. While retailers are convenient for consumers, redemption centers keep retail stores from becoming collection sites for used packaging.

Perhaps we can think more creatively and go beyond the traditional bottle bill structure. Should there be a heavier price on landfill-bound trash, instead of (or along with) recycling incentives? In Switzerland, for example, recycling is free but throwing away trash is costly - at least $2/bag. As a result, they’ve achieved phenomenal recycling rates, such as 80% for plastic PET bottles.

Another possibility is a federal container deposit law, such as the Bottle Recycling Climate Protection Act of 2007 introduced by Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey into the U.S. House of Representatives on November 15. This would provide for a 5¢ deposit on every beverage container sold in the U.S.

It’s also important to make recycling easy. Today, only about 50% of American households have access to curbside recycling programs. Curbside recycling programs and single-stream recycling (i.e., you can put all recyclables into one bin, instead of separating paper, glass, plastic, etc.) have been shown to boost recycling rates too.

There’s a lot to consider here, so please share your thoughts on how best to improve recycling rates.

Ben Jelen is an extraordinary singer-songwriter with a passion for the environment. This passion is infused throughout his music - check out the video of his single “Wreckage” below - and his life - his tour is carbon neutral. We’re thrilled and delighted to have Ben join us today and share his thoughts on FIJI Water, the Ben Jelen Foundation, recycling, and what we can all do to help care for our planet. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Ben Jelen…

FIJI WATER

What interests me most in Fiji water is that they are a carbon-negative company — this means that their net activities actually reduce carbon emissions!! - how is that even possible?

To understand, I imagined a world without Fiji water, where their company had not existed. In this world, there was no effort to replant old rainforest. In this world there was no profit set aside to offset carbon emissions — no money put into offset programs that plant trees and build infrastructure for clean energy. In fact this world had the island of Fiji exporting timber, depleting the beautiful Sovi basin. Fiji water shows us that any company, even one that is up against a literal ocean’s worth of emissions can still have a positive impact on the environment. It takes real dedication and I applaud them for setting this example.

Taking advantage of new advances in green technology, Fiji water fits into my philosophy on Environmentalism - they are targeting a way of operating cleanly, realizing it takes time to get there, so starting now. Fiji water is not abandoning their business, but taking something that is part of the problem and turning it into a solution.

It is in this train of philosophy that I have started the Ben Jelen Foundation. As a musical artist consistently writing and talking about these problems, the foundation has been an amazing outlet for me, and a real way of helping with the environmental issues out there, focusing on solutions rather than problems. We kicked the foundation off at South by Southwest earlier this 2008 and it was a great success - since, I’ve continued to raise money - the money will be donated to the four following areas, with the specific recipients changing from time to time.

• Education: Local (New York) education of teens on environmental issues.
• Political: Donations to groups that lobby for environmental protection at the political level.
• Humanitarian: Give to those worse affected by climate change.
• Investment: Continue the long process of investing in clean energy infrastructure.

We’re excited to partner with Fiji water, talk about the issues and watch our progress - Something we can all help out with now is to recycle all plastics. Once the product is in our hands we do also have the responsibility of ‘completing the cycle.’

Please enjoy the video for my song “Wreckage” - This song is about hope, that the choice of taking care of our planet is very much in our hands. I’m so glad to see companies change the landscape from the inside out, its exciting and real!

For any more info, visit www.benjelen.com/foundation

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” - this phrase captures a great philosophy about how to use precious resources. First reduce what you use; then reuse what you can; and finally recycle.

We’ve shared with you our commitments to reducing and recycling, and now here’s one of the most creative ways to “reuse” I’ve ever seen. Check this out - it’s a chandelier made out of FIJI Water bottles!

This was part of the decor at CS Magazine’s spring fashion show “Seeds of Spring” in Chicago last Thursday. The event planning adhered to high sustainability standards, featuring designers known for clothing made of sustainable materials, environmentally responsible food and beverage sponsors, and decor decisions that carefully considered environmental impacts.

The FIJI Water chandelier was constructed by Event Creative of Chicago using bottles our U.S. Midwest event coordinator David had collected from other events sponsored by FIJI Water.

And - because we can’t all have fabulous FIJI Water chandeliers and do need to recycle - David also arranged for recycling bins at the event and included a “blue recycling bag” in each of the 300 CS gift bags. (”Blue recycling bags” like the one pictured here are generally required to collect recyclables in Chicago.)

Check out BizBash to read more about the Seeds of Spring show.

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!