When you're a massive international corporation, it's hard to convince people you mean well.

Corporations have become essentially synonymous with evil whether you listen to pundits, politicians or film-makers. Where once we would have had evil foreigners plotting to blow us up in action movies, we now have dastardly CEOs plotting to make loads of money in a really evil way that will kill lots of babies as well. There's even a whole subsection of movies where evil corporations kill the environment (see On Deadly Ground). 

This is an unfair portrayal of most corporations, but it's become so prevalent that many companies are taking steps to make themselves seem kinder, gentler, and really nice to the environment and baby seals and whatnot.

This, as you can imagine, can lead to a fair bit of the ol' greenwashing.

Nestle is a massive corporation that produces a huge variety of food products from its flagship chocolate brands to instant coffee to, gulp, bottled water. 

Nestle made a boo-boo with its latest attempt to "green" bottled water. Their various bottled water brands, Poland Springs being the most well known, have all rolled out new ecobottles.

The bottles, according to Nestle, are a veritable wonderland of eco-friendly features. According to ads they feature a 30% smaller label, are "easy to carry" (though what this has to do with anything is beyond me) are "flexible" which is supposed to be good for recycling, and most importantly feature 30% less plastic. 

Let's do a little analysis. Out of four features, only one, maybe two, really have any environmental impact. A smaller label uses slightly less paper, so we'll give them that. And there is indeed 30% less plastic.

If you'll recall some of the original sins of greenwashing I wrote about a couple months ago, you'll remember a little something about the "lesser of two evils" sin. The ecobottle may be the lesser of two evils when compared to a normal bottle of water, but its still pretty wasteful.

I like to think that most environmentally conscious people are aware of the official environmentalist position on bottled water, i.e. It's bad. The fact that a bottle contains 30% less plastic does not change the fact that bottled water is by its very nature an environmentally unfriendly product. Packaging a product that is freely available in every place it is sold in plastic, then shipping it around the globe, is incredibly wasteful. Plastic is a nonrenewable fossil fuel, shipping water around uses more gas, and local aquifers can get drained easily by a bottled-water operation.

Greenwashing a bottle could result in more people buying it because they feel like the bottled water problem has been 'solved' on some level. And while the bottles are recyclable, it's a sad fact that over seventy percent of bottles end up in a landfill instead of a recycling center. 

I'm annoyed with Nestle for this greenwash, but I'm even more annoyed for some shenanigans they pulled with the UN. Nestle was part of a group of companies that announced their new CEO Water Mandate at the UN Global Compact Leaders meeting.

The mandate gives water-selling companies clear instructions and ideas on how to involve itself with public water management, basically giving for-profit companies more control over a public commodity. The document reads like a handbook for companies to ingratiate themselves into government decision making.

If Nestle really wants to make its image more green, it could start by coming up with a plan to actually help water management, rather than take advantage of it for profit.