On May 28, the Los Angeles Air Force Base (AFB) and the Defense Commissary Agency held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to dedicate the commissary’s new rooftop photovoltaic power system. FIJI Water was proud to be one of the sponsors for the ceremony, which recognized the Los Angeles AFB Commissary as the first military commissary in the world to become solar powered.

The solar power system produces enough electricity daily to power over ten households. The Los Angeles AFB Commissary has also demonstrated good environmental stewardship with initiatives that include recycling plastic and cardboard and installing energy-efficient lighting.

Don’t you love it when people serve their country, provide great benefits for their service members, and take care of the environment too? You can read more about the solar power system dedication on the Los Angeles AFB web site.

When I was a kid, I watched documentaries on PBS that talked about the importance of protecting rainforests. (Yeah, I was a nerdy kid who liked educational TV!) That instinctively made sense to me – I’d see those beautiful landscapes and interesting animals, and of course I wanted them to be safe always.

But the part I thought was really cool was how the local people lived in the rainforest – mainly because it looked like fun to move around your neighborhood on rafts instead of on land. Now I realize that’s not actually the case in every rainforest or in all seasons…but when you’ve only got a few years under your belt you miss some of the finer details.

Well, I’m a bit older now, but I’ve learned my initial instincts were sound…and also learned more about why rainforest conservation is so important. Here are the facts:

• Deforestation is the second largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions today, following only the power generation sector; it accounts for almost 20% of those emissions, or twice the emissions from all the world’s cars, trucks, and airplanes combined
• Tropical deforestation in developing countries is responsible for nearly all (96%) of the emissions from deforestation
• Forests protect water and soil quality and provide livelihoods for over 1.6 billion people around the world; many of them are the world’s poorest people in Africa, South America and Asia
• But less than 5% of tropical forests are managed sustainably, putting these livelihoods at risk
• Tropical forests play a critical role in protecting unique animals and plants you can’t find anywhere else in the world

Yet incentives to prevent deforestation were somehow not included in the Kyoto Protocol. You might wonder why the protocol didn’t address this if it’s so important.

To paint it in simple strokes: Developing nations wanted compensation for not cutting down their rainforests. After all, they argue, if they’re giving up income from forestry and logging, they should be able to make up the lost funds in another way. But industrialized nations didn’t want to pay developing nations for “doing nothing.” So they reached an impasse.

It’s our hope that future international agreements will incorporate effective action to reduce deforestation. In the meantime, we’ve been seeking to do our part by partnering with Conservation International to protect the Sovi Basin. Now, we obviously don’t treat the Sovi Basin project as an “offset,” because it’s already there – we didn’t plant it. But we knew the benefits the Sovi Basin would provide to Fiji and the rest of the world – shelter for unique species, watershed protection, erosion control, and carbon sequestration – were benefits we wanted to ensure forever.

And hopefully I’ll get to ride on a raft in the rainforest for real one of these days…whee!

To learn more about conservation and reforestation efforts going on around the world, check out Conservation International’s web site.

Ben Jelen is an extraordinary singer-songwriter with a passion for the environment. This passion is infused throughout his music – check out the video of his single “Wreckage” below – and his life – his tour is carbon neutral. We’re thrilled and delighted to have Ben join us today and share his thoughts on FIJI Water, the Ben Jelen Foundation, recycling, and what we can all do to help care for our planet. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Ben Jelen…

FIJI WATER

What interests me most in Fiji water is that they are a carbon-negative company — this means that their net activities actually reduce carbon emissions!! – how is that even possible?

To understand, I imagined a world without Fiji water, where their company had not existed. In this world, there was no effort to replant old rainforest. In this world there was no profit set aside to offset carbon emissions — no money put into offset programs that plant trees and build infrastructure for clean energy. In fact this world had the island of Fiji exporting timber, depleting the beautiful Sovi basin. Fiji water shows us that any company, even one that is up against a literal ocean’s worth of emissions can still have a positive impact on the environment. It takes real dedication and I applaud them for setting this example.

Taking advantage of new advances in green technology, Fiji water fits into my philosophy on Environmentalism – they are targeting a way of operating cleanly, realizing it takes time to get there, so starting now. Fiji water is not abandoning their business, but taking something that is part of the problem and turning it into a solution.

It is in this train of philosophy that I have started the Ben Jelen Foundation. As a musical artist consistently writing and talking about these problems, the foundation has been an amazing outlet for me, and a real way of helping with the environmental issues out there, focusing on solutions rather than problems. We kicked the foundation off at South by Southwest earlier this 2008 and it was a great success – since, I’ve continued to raise money – the money will be donated to the four following areas, with the specific recipients changing from time to time.

• Education: Local (New York) education of teens on environmental issues.
• Political: Donations to groups that lobby for environmental protection at the political level.
• Humanitarian: Give to those worse affected by climate change.
• Investment: Continue the long process of investing in clean energy infrastructure.

We’re excited to partner with Fiji water, talk about the issues and watch our progress – Something we can all help out with now is to recycle all plastics. Once the product is in our hands we do also have the responsibility of ‘completing the cycle.’

Please enjoy the video for my song “Wreckage” – This song is about hope, that the choice of taking care of our planet is very much in our hands. I’m so glad to see companies change the landscape from the inside out, its exciting and real!

For any more info, visit www.benjelen.com/foundation

I’m feeling inspired after spending last week in Fiji. Fiji, of course, is so beautiful that it’s always inspiring. On top of this, the team at the bottling facility is doing some fantastic work to reduce our carbon footprint and improve recycling rates in our local community. They encouraged me tremendously, so I’d like to share some of their stories with you over the next few postings.

Let’s start with recycling at the bottling facility. Paul, our Director of Production Operations & Engineering, has been hard at work over the past year and a half figuring out how to recycle manufacturing waste materials. Thanks to his efforts and those of our recycling partners in Australia, we’ve reduced by 70% the amount of manufacturing waste taken to landfills. Paul’s ultimate goal is for the FIJI Water plant to become a “zero waste” facility, meaning we will reduce, reuse, or recycle all waste.

At first Paul started with plastic and cardboard, for which there are many eager buyers already. Not content with that, however, Paul and the team persisted and found buyers for lab coats, shoe covers, hair nets, pallet strapping, bulk bags and drums, empty spools, and more. (Who knew you could recycle this kind of stuff too?)

When looking for buyers to take the recyclables, Paul simply asks that they pay enough to cover the cost of transportation. With popular materials like PET, however, he can usually get more. So he’s taken the money earned and reinvested it into the recycling infrastructure at the plant. This helps us recycle more materials and do so more efficiently. The bottling facility is now capable of recycling not only its own waste, but also recyclable materials brought in by local residents from their villages and towns. This is important because there is no other recycling infrastructure available to the local community.

In case you are wondering whether the greenhouse gas emissions from transporting recyclable materials to buyers are worth the effort to recycle, here are the numbers from our base year.

• Emissions created by transporting recyclables: 13 tonnes CO2eq
• Emissions avoided by recycling materials instead of producing new ones: 619 tonnes CO2eq

The net impact is an emissions reduction of 606 tonnes CO2eq, having the same effect as taking 111 passenger vehicles off the road for a year or planting over 15,000 trees.

This works on an individual level too. Every time you recycle the packaging for anything you use – food and beverage, for example – you reduce its carbon footprint. Play our recycling game to learn how this works!

We here at FIJI Water hear a lot of complaints about “food miles,” ours in particular. The concept is that the longer your food travels, the worse it is for the environment.

We think this is a load of hooey…and so do scientists who have studied lifecycle carbon footprints. The key word here is lifecycle – how a product is developed or packaged, what the transport mode is, and other factors can have a far greater impact for better or worse than the mere distance traveled.

The New Yorker recently published an article about carbon footprints that, among other things, summarized major scientific studies on “food miles.” These studies have shown:

• Apples imported from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can have a lower carbon footprint than apples raised fifty miles away. Adrian Williams of the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England, explains: “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity.” This means you get more good apples per acre, and the manmade energy required to grow the crop is therefore lower. New Zealand also has many renewable energy sources with little or no carbon impact.
• Lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped to England has one-fourth the carbon footprint of lamb raised and consumed in England. Lambs in New Zealand feed on pastures that generally require less fertilizer than grazing land in the U.K., and fertilizer has a big carbon impact.
• Importing beans from Uganda or Kenya to Europe is less carbon-intensive than growing beans in Europe. The farms in Uganda and Kenya are small, rarely use tractors, and fertilize the crop with manure, while European farms often require energy-dependent irrigation systems.
• Roses shipped from Holland to England have a seed-to-store carbon footprint six times that of roses air freighted from Kenya. That’s because the Dutch roses almost always are grown in greenhouses, which use lots of energy.

And here’s an example closer to home for us: We used to send product to New York by ship from Fiji to Los Angeles, then truck from Los Angeles to the East Coast. Now we send the product by ship through the Panama Canal to Philadelphia or Newark, then truck to New York – a route that covers 50% more miles, but reduces emissions by 55%. This is because ocean freight causes 85% less emissions than trucking. Had we used food miles as a metric, we would never have made this change.

The real problem with the “food miles” concept is that it misleads people who are genuinely trying to make ethical decisions. There are still people who are choosing to “buy/eat local” and thereby actually making their environmental impact worse than it otherwise would have been. It’s unfair to them and to the environment. Of course, it’s hard for people to make the right decisions unless they have the right information, which is why it’s so important for companies to publish the full lifecycle carbon footprints of their products.

ELLE Magazine has recognized FIJI Water in its annual green issue with an ELLE 2008 Green Award! We were hailed – alongside other recipients like Brad Pitt, the Energy Action Coalition and Paul and Stella McCartney – as one of the “people, products and concepts that put energy, and our planet, in the right place.” They highlighted the fact that FIJI Water is “carbon negative – not neutral – this year,” and spoke about our commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the bottling and shipping process, to preserve the Fijian rainforest, and to minimize packaging.

Take a look at what the other award winners are doing too. It’s so inspiring!

Our Senior VP Sustainable Growth, Thomas Mooney, recently spoke with Sustainable Life Media. In this interview, Thomas explains how we’re planning to fulfill the FIJI Green promise and answers the criticism that “bottled water” and “sustainable” don”t belong in the same sentence. You can read the interview here or listen here.

Last November, FIJI Water promised to reduce its carbon footprint by 25% by 2010. In the past few months, we”ve taken a number of steps toward that goal:

• We”ve started producing the 1.5 L product with an initial 7% reduction in packaging.
• We”ve reduced by 70% the amount of manufacturing waste materials taken to landfills.
• We”re using more fuel-efficient trucks in Fiji to transport the product from plant to port, resulting in a 50% reduction in fuel usage.
• By optimizing our logistics, we”ve reduced trucking miles from warehouses to distributors by 26% on average.

These changes reflect a lot of hard work and initiative on the part of many people throughout the company, especially our operations and logistics teams. We look forward to sharing more good news like this over the coming months.

Today we announced our carbon footprint and reported on our progress to date toward fulfilling the promise of FIJI Green. We”re thinking of this as FIJI Green”s first “annual report,” even though it”s all online and not a big book. (And we”ll update you more than once a year – that”s what this blog is for!)

Why does this matter? We believe consumers will make environmentally responsible purchasing decisions if they have the information they need. The trouble is that they often don”t have this information. It”s like trying to tackle the obesity epidemic by removing nutrition labels from food and beverage products – that doesn”t make any sense, and neither does trying to tackle climate change without giving consumers the carbon footprints of the products they eat, drink, and use.

We hope that companies in our industry and beyond will provide comparable lifecycle carbon footprints for their products, so that we can all work together to address the issue of climate change. In this spirit, we have become the first privately held company ever to join the Carbon Disclosure Project”s (CDP) Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. The CDP is the world”s largest investor coalition on climate change and has been the leader over the past several years in working with companies to disclose their carbon footprints. We will work with the CDP to disclose our carbon footprint and encourage our suppliers to do the same.

Hi everyone, welcome to our blog! We”re excited about starting this up and look forward to sharing with you the latest news on FIJI Green, our path to sustainability. We”ll talk about our day-to-day wins and struggles, neat stuff we”re learning along the way, and opportunities for you to get involved.

And we want to hear from you! Please share your thoughts on FIJI Green, what we”re doing, what we have plannedÖall of it. Feel free to ask questions too – we know topics like carbon footprints and climate change can get pretty complicated, and we”ll do our best to make them a bit easier to understand.