Friday Opening Keynote
From Source to Blue Bin: Extending U.S. Beverage Producer Responsibility
Kim Jeffery, President and CEO, Nestle Waters
William McDonough, Author, Cradle to Cradle
The 2010 Net Impact conference began with a stimulating discussion between Kim Jeffery and William McDonough, who discussed today’s bottled beverage industry. It was interesting to see people react to Jeffery’s story, which could easily be construed as anti-environmental, especially in the eyes of this particular audience. Bringing the founding father of bottled water to speak to a room full of sustainability activists was a bold move. He was introduced by the moderator, Marc Gunther, as “an environmentalist,” a description which provoked some cynicism.
What the audience wanted to know was: Why should people drink bottled water when we have access to clean, drinkable, free tap water? Why would we drink water that has been shipped an average of 270 miles by truck (a “tight footprint” according to Jeffery), and bottled in PET made from fossil fuels? Rather than answer this question directly, Jeffery deflected it in a few ways. His overarching arguments were:
1) People need to drink more water, period. People drink too much soda, and health problems such as diabetes and obesity have become epidemics. Water, very aptly described by Jeffery as a “healthy hydration beverage,” should be consumed more, and people should be free to choose whatever form they prefer, be it tap or bottled. When asked if reusable bottles would be a preferable alternative to disposable plastic bottles, Jeffery answered “If that’s your bias, that’s fine.” He posits water as the driving force behind the “health and wellness trend” that needs to happen. Bottled beverages became mainstream in the late 1980s, and Jeffery is proud to have introduced water as an option so people could choose to consume something other than sugary pop.
2) As far as the trash issue goes, Jeffery was optimistic about the role Nestle is playing, and about the contribution the company is making in the bottled beverage industry. Nestle has reduced the weight of its bottles so that they require less plastic, and the company promotes recycling. According to Jeffery the problem doesn’t lie in the plastic bottles, but in the recycling infrastructure (or lack there of) in the U.S. Curbside recycling is not available to many Americans, which means that consumers simply don’t recycle enough, preventing those PET bottles from being reclaimed. While Jeffery admits that the bottling industry should be responsible for the lifecycle of its product, he believes that the more important issue is tackling the root of the problem by increasing the availability of recycling facilities.
Jeffery sees this an a governmental problem, not a business problem. We cannot increase our rates of recycling without the government installing facilities and increasing existing infrastructure.
Jeffery doesn’t see this happening any time soon, so his vision for a recycling America is one in which the initiative is taken by privately funded companies who would coordinate recycling programs on a state level. He sees two problems with government-run recycling programs. First, there aren’t enough of them. Second, they take money from states by retaining any unredeemed bottle collection funds. In other words, if people don’t return their bottles the government keeps the 5 or 10 cent deposit per bottle. It was interesting that Jeffery first positioned his product as a cure to our health epidemic, then displaced blame for environmental harm onto the government. He even threw in a quasi-patriotic plug, saying that if people preferred to drink bottled water, that’s perfectly fine because “[t]hat’s what America’s about, we have choices.”
Interestingly, the keynote speaker the following morning was Gary Hirshberg, the founder of Stonyfield Farm organic yogurt. We learned from Hirshberg that all of Stonyfield’s highly perishable products are shipped by freight in an effort to minimize the company’s carbon footprint. Nestle, on the other hand, uses the “just in time” inventory policy, apparently requiring the company to ship bottled water by truck. It was interesting to hear two entirely different opinions on this matter in two days.
Bill McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle, had some insights to contribute. He dispelled the idea of being able to throw things “away” – a place that “doesn’t exist.” Instead of trying to achieve zero waste, McDonough urges us to “eliminate the concept of waste” entirely. It’s not about minimizing, but about optimizing.
It was interesting to see the synergy between Jeffery and McDonough, who have worked together before in their efforts to point the bottling industry in the right direction. McDonough sees plastic bottles as an asset, because as a source of fixed carbon, they are nothing less than “solid oil.” Like Jeffery, he advocates more infrastructure to increase recycling rates, so that we might reclaim more of this resource that is being thrown to the elusive “away.” One thing that they could both agree on is that bottled water may be a face of the problem, but it is not the real culprit. As both men pointed out, if bottled water were to disappear tomorrow, the sustainability problem we’re facing today would still exist. We have to think about long-term solutions to the source of the problem, rather than attack surface issues.
This is largely about creating infrastructure to make recycling readily available to everyone. Today only 1 in 3 disposable water bottles are recycled; Jeffery hopes that this rate can double in the next ten years. For McDonough, infrastructure is certainly an important issue that needs to be tackled. Even more pressing than that, however, is creating a mental infrastructure that will motivate us all to become part of a major paradigm shift.
