Fiji Water urges firms to embrace carbon footprinting for products

Bottled water company Fiji Water this week became the latest firm to provide information on the carbon footprint of its individual products and called on more firms to release carbon data for their products.

"Consumers will make environmentally responsible purchasing decisions if they have the information they need," said Thomas Mooney, senior vice president, sustainable growth at Fiji Water. "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."

He added that more firms should provide comparable product lifecycle emissions for all their products, allowing consumers to make informed decisions about which products to select based on their environmental impact.

Fiji Water said it will now provide carbon footprint data for all its products on its website. The company said it had calculated its carbon emissions in line with Carbon Disclosure Project standards across every stage of the product lifecycle, including 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 or recycling of the packaging waste.

Mooney said that the initiative meant that the company could not only disclose the data to customers but had also been able to identify the best areas to focus its carbon reduction efforts.

The move is the latest in a number of projects designed to deliver a standardised granular approach to carbon footprint calculations that will allow firms to label products with their individual emissions impact.

Most notably, the UK's Carbon Trust is currently working with Tesco, Boots, Walkers and Innocent Smoothies on a major carbon labelling project that aims to develop a standard carbon reporting system that can be used to calculate emissions across multiple product types.