In the week that climate scientists finally lost their collective rag with the public and politicians, telling them ‘change your behaviour NOW or reap the whirlwind‘, Fiji Water have announced a nationwide listing deal with Tesco.
The new deal means that UK consumers will no longer have to suffer the indignity of drinking water that has fallen out the the sky above their heads. Instead they now have easy access to Instagram-worthy water that came from an aquifer in the South Pacific, which has been put in plastic bottles and sent 15,000km by diesel-burning ship to their nearest Tesco Metro.
Between July 2006 and June 2007, production and sale of Fiji Water released 85,396 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) into the atmosphere (Carbon Disclosure Project, 2008). Despite reaching out to Fiji Water, I could not find more recent carbon footprint figures. However, the press release sent out about the new Tesco deal proudly claims internet searches for the product have increased by 400%, so we can only assume more people are buying it, and even more carbon is being needlessly dumped into the environment. Not to mention the resultant plastic waste that will inevitably find its way into the oceans.
This is rank insanity.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) document, which was released this week as Advice to Policy Makers, describes the moment we are living in right now as ‘the final call to save the world from climate catastrophe’. It states that there is a very limited window left to us, if we are to stop global warming passing 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures. To put that in perspective, 1.5 degrees is the ‘everything will be shit, but we’ll probably survive’ mark. As it stands, and if nothing changes, the world is on course to warm by 3 degrees, which will cause change to the climate that constitutes a genuine existential threat to the human race.
We can’t rely on our governments to sort this out. Politicians are too concerned with fucking up the future with Brexit, colluding with the Russians, or not upsetting voters in an effort to get re-elected to make the dramatic and far-reaching changes required to stay below a 1.5 degree raise in temperature. The work will need to be done by individuals and businesses who posses a conscience, and one of the changes we can make as individuals and an industry, is to buy and stock local products that don’t carry a massive carbon footprint.
There are other offenders of course, many brands have massive carbon footprints. But shipping water 15,000km just because it is “a favourite of A-listers” and the bottles have pretty labels? This is complete madness. Bollocks to Fiji Water. Serve tap water in a glass bottle and help save the world.