Want to see greenwashing in action? Than cast your eye on Nestle Waters YouTube videos about bottled water: How Much Water Does it Take to Make Bottled Water?

In this dubious video, the company outlines how water conscious they are, because less water goes into a bottle of water than into the making of a latte. When I hear stuff like that, it’s not the caffeine in the latte that keeps me up at night.  

Maybe the water usage is down, but what about what all that water is going into. Plastic bottles. You can’t be an environmental champion when, as the largest bottled water company in the world, your plastic bottles end up chocking our landfills and littering our environment with their plastic debris that will take centuries, if ever, to decompose. As if the landfill issues weren’t bad enough, how about the vast pollution trail that comes along with plastic bottle manufacturing? 

They start their life in an oil field, get transported in a huge oil tanker (remember the Exxon Valdes?), get trucked from ports to refineries, get synthesized into toxic chemicals that become plastic in a plastic manufacturing plant — which is in itself an ecological nightmare. For something so light in weight, that little plastic bottle has a pretty heavy footprint.  

It’s actually shameful to see a company spinning a tale with so long a pollution trail. Instead why don’t they put their efforts where it might matter? Into the development and production of a biodegradable plant-based bottle. They do exist.  

If companies like Nestle don’t get it by now, they really should begin to see that consumers see through these spin doctored messages. And actually begin to resent the tale tellers. Horizon Dairy found that out when their happy cows really weren’t too happy. And neither were many of their customers who found that out and organized a boycott against their products.

Things like clean coal and water-saving bottled water might sound good on paper, but they sound like bull-produced natural plant food to most of us.

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