Fiji Water’s Natural Resource Management

Fiji Water’s Natural Resource Management

By: Brandon Cothron

Location: L.A. Bottle-Making Plant/ Fiji Bottle Filling Plant

 I researched Fiji water and how it makes its bottles and fills the bottles in Fiji. I emailed the L.A. bottle-making factory, which produces around 50,000 bottles an hour and visited the Fiji factory this pervious summer, during my vacation to Fiji, which peaked my interest for the paper. The paper will cover many natural resource management subjects, but it will mainly cover sustainability and how the company effects the environment.

        Bottling water has always seemed like a weird phenomenon. You are taking something that is easily attainable anywhere, through water fountains, tap water at home, or even putting tap water in your own container, and then you make it into a product to sell. “According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006, sold in bottles ranging from the 8-ounce aquapods popular in school lunches to the multi-gallon bottles found in family refrigerators and office water coolers. Most of this water was sold in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, requiring nearly 900,000 tons of the plastic” (Pacific Institute, 2007).  Bottling water doesn’t only require more plastic to be put into production but it also requires more water to make a bottle of water than is actually put into it. “It takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water” (Pacific Institute, 2007).  Basically anyway of making water come in bottles is in now way, shape, or form good for the environment. “It takes around 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-liter plastic bottle, cap, and packaging. Making enough plastic to bottle 31.2 billion liters of water required more than 106 billion megajoules of energy. Because a barrel of oil contains around 6 thousand megajoules, the Pacific Institute estimates that the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil were needed to produce these plastic bottles, not including transportation. Bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2006” (Pacific Institute, 2007). So why do we bottle water at all?