Friday, March 27, 2009

Best "greenwashing" of the year?

And now for something completely ridiculous:

Pepsi is releasing a "Eco-fina", a more ecologically friendly version of the company's Aquafina bottled water. The Eco-Fina bottle is lighter and contain 20% less plastic. Never mind that the new light bottles will still contain plain-old tap water that has been subject to an unregulated and unnecessary purification process.

One may want to applaud the development of a new, more efficient beverage container. How about reserving that new technology for beverages that actually require a container?

This snippet from a 2006 article in the Globe and Mail neatly summarizes the inanity of the bottled water industry, especially the bottled water sold by the major beverage companies like Pepsi and Coke:

A one-litre bottle of Dasani brand water, sold at a Toronto supermarket recently for $1.59, retails for about 3,000 times the price of a litre of municipal water from nearby Brampton, where the container was filled. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. filters the municipal water and then adds minerals to improve its taste. Federal product labelling laws do not require bottlers to indicate that their products originally were tap water, but do require companies to say whether it is spring or mineral water.

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