Greenwashing and Social Responsibility
This morning, I got water and a croissant instead of my usual coffee. The water available at my usual cafe was FIJI, and I commented that I felt bad, as the water has a huge negative environmental impact.
Impressively, FIJI is tracking commentary of it’s brand on Twitter, and responded to me a few hours later, with information on how the company is now carbon negative.
This doesn’t argue against my core issue, which is simple: the nature of the product itself makes it bad for the environment. No matter how much money is spent to offset the negative effects of bottling water in Fiji and shipping it all over the world, those negative effects still exist.
Which is a roundabout way of saying - if you need to spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours addressing the negative press generated by something that is an integral part of your business model, you need to go deeper than treating the symptoms of that failure.
50 points for stepping up and counteracting the negative effects of your business, FIJI. And negative 50 points for having a business model that cannot operate without creating those problems in the first place.
