Corporate attempts to label their products as “green” for the sake of turning a fast buck are nothing new. Corporations exist, after all, in order to make money, and capitalizing on whatever is capturing the public’s collective imagination is often the best way of doing so. But Fiji Artisanal Water’s entree into the green movement strikes us as particularly suspect.

The company has recently launched fijigreen.com, a website outlining the ways in which their water is “good for the environment.”

If you’re anything like us, you are probably wondering how this claim could be true.

It can’t. 

While Fiji’s Artisanal Water’s commitment to reducing their packaging, investing in rainforest renewal and reducing their carbon emissions may be applauded by some, these measures are not enough to make them a green company. By definition, bottled water is simply not an environmentally friendly product.

When companies package and sell water, they take a natural resource that falls freely from the sky from communities that need it, stick it in plastic bottles (made from oil, of course), and ship it across the globe to sell it for hundreds, sometimes thousands of times its actual value.  And while Fiji and its cohorts can encourage consumers to recycle, the fact of the matter is that 86% of empty plastic water bottles in the United States end up in the trash, instead of being recycled.

With citizens and governments around the world abuzz with worries of oil shortages, how can companies continue to manufacture a needless product that directly contributes to this impending crisis, let alone have the audacity to proclaim it “green?”

The most sustainable water option isn’t actually green at all (if it were, that would be a bit scary). It’s actually quite clear: tap water.  It’s convenient, delivered through energy-efficient means, and in most cases, is just as healthy and pure as its froufy bottled counterparts--sometimes cleaner.  Even better, it requires spending very little green in order to do something green.

For more on why tap water is a better alternative to bottled, check out our resources at www.takebackthetap.org. Then tell us how you feel about Fiji Artisanal Water’s not-so-green marketing machine.