FIJI Water Releases Carbon Footprint Analysis of Products
FIJI® Water recently announced that it had joined the Carbon Disclosure Project Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration to fully disclose the carbon footprint of its products. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the world's largest investor coalition on climate change, will work with FIJI Water to engage with suppliers to disclose their emissions.
FIJI Water is the first privately owned U.S. company to join the Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration, which uses the CDP information request to engage with suppliers to encourage them to measure and disclose their carbon emissions.
For the base year ending June 30, 2007, FIJI Water's total annual carbon footprint from every stage of its production and distribution was 85,396 metric tons of CO2eq. To put this number in perspective, it is estimated that the U.S.'s carbon footprint is about 7 billion metric tons of CO2eq. This means that each person in the U.S. 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, 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 lifecycle: 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 the packaging waste. This comprehensive supply chain view is important because approximately 75 percent of FIJI Water's emissions result from the operations of supply chain partners, e.g. raw materials suppliers, 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 overall product lifecycle emissions for the base year, FIJI Water announced the launch of a product-specific emissions disclosure effort via the company's www.fijigreen.com website. At this site consumers will have access to product lifecycle emissions data and analysis for each of the company's products.
"FIJI Water believes that consumers will make environmentally responsible purchasing decisions if they have the information they need," Mooney said. "Would we attempt to tackle the obesity epidemic by removing nutrition labels from food and beverage products? Of course not, and likewise the only way consumers can turn their good environmental intentions into good decisions is to give them the information they need regarding the emissions associated with the products they buy. We sincerely hope that other companies, in our industry and beyond, will follow in providing comparable product lifecycle emissions data for all of their products."
Paul Dickinson, CEO of CDP said: "CDP's Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration is a key step to encouraging suppliers to work with their customers to measure and disclose their carbon emissions. It is only by understanding the carbon footprint of suppliers, that a company is able to measure its own carbon footprint."
As part of its sustainable growth initiative to become carbon negative, FIJI Water will offset its total carbon footprint by 120 percent. For example, the total grams of CO2eq removed from the atmosphere for FIJI Water's 1L bottle will be 115 grams, the equivalent of the electricity saved by shutting down a laptop computer overnight instead of leaving it on. Across all products sold in 2008, the company expects to deliver a net reduction of more than 20,000 tons of CO2eq from the atmosphere as a result of this commitment. This is equivalent to taking more than 3,500 cars off the road or planting more than 500,000 trees.