BW Interview With Ethos Water Founders
I have blogged about Ethos Water before but wanted to provide a link to recent interview BusinessWeek conducted with the company’s founders, Jonathan Greenblatt and Peter Thum (“Buy Water, Help Children” [BW online]). The interview is quite thought-provoking and well worth a few minutes to read for anyone interested in Ethos Water or water shortage issues.
At then end of the interview, the founders were asked a question I have also been itching to ask. Though their response didn’t really address the central point of the question, I found what they did say to have some value:
“[BusinessWeek]: Critics of the bottled-water industry point out that much of the water being sold is no healthier than tap water, that the bottles themselves are made of toxic chemicals, and that the energy required to distribute the water is immense. As a company founded on a social mission, how does Ethos respond to these critics?
“Thum: I don’t think that we can answer for the entire bottled-water industry. What we’re trying to do is make the American public aware of this problem [lack of access to clean water] — a problem that kills more people than AIDS.
“The bottled-water industry may not be perfect, but if you can take a sliver of the industry and turn it towards something positive, that’s a good thing. The most important thing is to start a dialogue and to get people in the U.S. to start thinking about the world water crisis not just as something that affects people far away, but as a problem that we will face soon as well.”
Still, whether public awareness is a valid goal or not, there remains that niggling issue about the efficiency and irony of trying to battle water shortages (or potable water shortages) with bottled water…
TAGS: This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 10:03 am and is filed under Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.