Fiji Water's "green" motivations come into question

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"How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?" The cover article of the Sept./Oct. Mother Jones submerges the already sullied reputation of the bottled water industry to new lows by focusing on one of the only thus unblemished companies: Fiji Water.

What's probably most interesting about the article, other than the all-too-predictable news (at least to the cynical among us) that Fiji Water has "near-exclusive" access to the aquifer the water comes from and that some of Fiji's own natives lack access to clean drinking water, is just how much we have allowed the company to "greenwash" us with its marketing.

The article also includes a great sidebar with blurbs about the stains on the names of various other snake oil UHH bottled water sellers. For example, Sam's Club bottled water is merely Las Vegas' drinking water it says, which, when tested, was apparently found to contain 200 percent of the allowable amount of a known carcinogen as well as several chemicals known to cause DNA damage. Ugh.