FIJI Water: Accused of Greenwashing

FIJI Water has recently been accused of greenwashing. Greenwashing is a term that is used to describe companies that mislead their consumers into believing that they are an environmentally safe company. With the threat of global warming due to greenhouse gases, many people have become extremely sensitive to companies that aren’t doing their part to keep the world a great place to live for thousands of years to come. This has caused problems for FIJI Water because their business is successful only if they are able to get consumers to buy their water even though they aren’t an environmentally friendly company. Fiji, an island located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, has to ship bottled water 5,500 miles to the United States, which produces 216,000,000 pounds of greenhouse gases per trip. This has a huge impact on the environment and therefore has led to many conservationists attacks due to FIJI Water’s claim to go carbon negative. FIJI Water promised to reduce their packaging by 20 percent per year, supply at least 50 percent of the energy used at its plants with renewable energy, optimized logistics and use more carbon-efficient transportations modes, restore degraded grasslands in Fiji, and support recycling programs for plastic bottles. They claimed that this would have a net reduction of carbon in the atmosphere, and used the slogan “every drop is green” to symbolize that their company wasn’t doing any harm to the environment. While they promised this and created a website to show that they were going carbon negative, there were no numbers to prove that they actually accomplished what they intended to do. I completely agree with the conservationists that they are greenwashing because it’s hard to believe that a company exporting 90 percent of their products to places that are thousands of miles away and emit a ton of greenhouse gases would be able to be carbon negative. Some companies don’t get caught for their greenwashing, but when it’s completely obvious