Is it CSR if the product is unsustainable?

Bottled water has been getting a lot of bad rap and for good reason. The production of bottled water is a very energy intensive process and it involves huge amounts of plastic. The water that you paid so much money for because 'it is bottled from fresh mountain springs that flows through pristine forests where wildflowers bloom and wee birdies sing' is in most cases,  just purified drinking water. The process of bottling this fresh spring water is the very thing responsible for the death of the wee birdies and wildflowers. Did I also mention dead fish and polluted rivers?

Annie Leonard in her Story of Bottled Water articulately describes the whole chain of events from cola companies first creating a 'manufactured demand' by claiming that tap water is harmful and is a health-risk. They then proposed to fill this void for healthy water by introducing bottled water - the miracle solution, supposedly. In most places filtered, tap water is perfectly safe to drink. Of course there are places in the world that water is so contaminated that you wouldn't want to drink it but our obsession for bottled water is making resources of clean water even scarcer. Then there is the question of what to do with all that plastic - where does it go when it is thrown away? Apparently it is exported from America all the way to Madras, India to be down-cycled into things that fall apart easily that need to be recycled again. I don't know about you but this strikes me as wrong and not extremely clever.

So what does all this have to do with CSR? Lately there is overwhelming evidence that companies producing bottled water are talking about bottling water differently. In 2008,  Ethos, a bottled water brand was launched by Starbucks and Pepsi. Ethos partnered with H2O Africa, an organization co-founded by actor Matt Damon that carries out drinking water projects in Africa. For each bottle sold, 5c go to the Ethos Water Fund and this act of charity goes down as a CSR effort for both Pepsi and Starbucks.

PepsiCo announced in 2009 at the World Economic Forum that it will donate $2.5 million to H2O Africa. It also devised methods to reduce packaging, labeling and bottle thickness to save resources.  Additionally, under its charitable arm the PepsiCo Foundation, the company also delivered a $6 million grant to the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The institute is working to develop solutions for global water scarcity. The foundation pledges to bring more than one million people safe drinking water by 2010.

Among the other companies talking about CSR are Coca-Cola which has partnered with WWF as part of its commitment to water conservation and sustainable communities. Nestle also works with policy makers and is a partner with Project WET that collaborates with teachers to ensure water conservation. It has also reduced its packaging by 50% and bottles its water in LEED certified plants. FIJI LLC is another company that has responded to CSR issues and it participates in measuring and reducing its carbon footprint as well responsibilities to key stakeholders.

The International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) mounted a vigorous rebuttal to the Story of Bottled Water by producing one of its own videos by highlighting what many bottled-water companies are doing for the environment. The cute little bottled water mascot claims that PET bottles are the most recycled waste and that bottled water is the "best environmentally friendly consumer product available today".

So who is right? Or is that even the question to be asking? I would think that common sense dictates that the cleanest, greenest source of water does not come encased in a plastic bottle.