Everyone wants to be green, and these days it seems like anyone can.  We recently saw Fiji attempt to advertise itself as sustainable, and now, having just received environmental certification from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Cargill is projecting an image of itself as an environmental steward.

Before we dole out our praise, let’s review a few of Cargill’s other claims to fame:

• In the past decade, Cargill has managed to spill toxic waste into San Francisco Bay and nearby marshes six times.
• Emissions from its processing plants have violated the Clean Air Act.
• By expanding production in Latin America, Cargill has destroyed acres of valuable rainforest.
  

So what are we to make of this environmental certification?  It turns out that it means very little in terms of the corporation’s overall environmental impact.  According to the ISO website, the standard that Cargill met (ISO 14001) “does not itself state specific environmental performance criteria.”  Instead, it establishes requirements for an environmental management system that “applies to those environmental aspects which an organization identifies as those which it can control and those which it can influence.”  Cargill gets to choose the issues that it thinks it should work to improve, and as long as it works on them it is up to par and gets a pat on the back.

In a press release, Cargill Meat Solutions president Bill Rupp proudly states that the certification “allows us to assess what we’re doing so we can continuously improve.”  Let’s hope that this is true and that they take advantage of it, because Cargill has a lot of room for improvement before it can honestly qualify as an environmental steward.

Cows produce significant quantities of greenhouse gases.  Greenhouse gases are bad.  Therefore, anything that might reduce the number of cows is good, right?  This is the line of argument that proponents of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH, also referred to as rBST) have taken in an effort to garner support for the artificial hormone.  The claim that rBGH will benefit the environment is based on a new study that allegedly shows that the use of the artificial hormone will allow fewer dairy cows to produce the same quantity of milk.  However, a little digging will reveal a number of problems with this study, and hence, with this claim.

But first I’d like to remind you about Monsanto, the enormous agricultural corporation that developed rBGH and markets it as the drug Prosilac.  The company clearly has a large stake in any publicity regarding the artificial hormone, so the fact that two of the researchers who conducted the study have significant ties to Monsanto is suspicious, to say the least.  One of the researchers, Roger Cady, is the company’s technical project manager for rBGH, and the main researcher, Dale Bauman, has served the company as a paid consultant since the 1980s. 

Additionally, the trustworthiness of the results is questionable given that previous investigations into the environmental impact of rBGH have not reached the same conclusion.  The Food and Drug Administration, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have concluded that any change in greenhouse gas emissions is negligible and the use of the artificial hormone might even result in more emissions.  Dale Bauman argues that his study is more accurate, but given his and Roger Cady’s ties to Monsanto, I find myself siding with the government organizations on this one.

Yes, it is important to lower emissions, but we do not need rBGH in order to do this, as there are several other effective approaches that the industry should focus on.  Already, changes in nutrition and breeding have resulted in a substantial decrease, and scientists from the University of Melbourne claim that altering the composition of the feed could further reduce emissions by half.  The diary farms that use rBGH most are large and industrial – the same farms that produce most of the pollution in the first place.  If these farms truly want to reduce their environmental impact, they need to focus first on changing their basic practices to be more sustainable.  So the question is this: Do we ignore the bias in this new study and use rBGH to lower emissions, or do we put our energy into the alternative, less controversial approaches?  Considering the health risks associated with rBGH, I think the answer is pretty clear; we should be opposing rBGH, not celebrating it.

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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.