Fiji Water Reveals Carbon Footprint

CAROL ANGRISANI

LOS ANGELES — Fiji Water has joined the Carbon Disclosure Project's Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration to fully disclose the carbon footprint of its products. The Carbon Disclosure Project, the world's largest investor coalition on climate change, will work with Fiji Water to engage with suppliers to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Fiji said it is the first privately owned U.S. company to join the SCLC.

For the base year ending June 30, 2007, Fiji Water's total annual carbon footprint from every stage of its production and distribution system was 85,396 metric tons of CO2eq, or carbon dioxide equivalents. It is estimated that the total carbon footprint of the U.S. is about 7 billion metric tons of CO2eq. This means that each person in the nation can be linked to an average of 20 metric tons of carbon emissions annually.

“Having an accurate account of our carbon footprint and ensuring transparency by reporting it annually to CDP are important steps to enable us to understand where to focus resources to reduce our carbon emissions,” said Thomas Mooney, senior vice president of sustainable growth at Fiji Water. “We are very proud to be the first bottled water brand to pioneer carbon disclosure of our products.”

To measure its carbon footprint, Fiji Water calculated its carbon emissions across every stage in the product life cycle: producing raw materials for packaging, transporting raw materials and equipment to the plant, manufacturing and filling bottles, shipping the product from Fiji to markets worldwide, distributing the product, refrigerating the product in stores, restaurants, and other outlets, and disposing/recycling of waste.

About 75% of Fiji Water's emissions result from the operations of supply chain partners, rather than from the company's own operations. The company also looked at emissions from sales and administrative activities such as commuting, business travel and office electricity usage.

In addition to disclosing its emissions for the base year, Fiji Water announced the launch of a product-specific emissions disclosure effort via the company's “Fiji Green” website at www.fijigreen.com. As part of its sustainable growth initiative to become carbon-negative, Fiji Water has pledged to offset its total carbon footprint by 120%.