bottled water Archives - GreenMonk: the blog

I attended SAP’s Sapphire Now conference in Orlando earlier this week along with around 12,000 others.

It was a very interesting few days of talks, meetings, and showcases.

SAP’s commitment to Sustainability was evident throughout the event. The two keynote speakers invited by SAP were Al Gore and Richard Branson, for example – both of whom talked about the importance of sustainability to help mitigate climate change.

For me though, the most impressive statement that SAP considers Sustainability a strategic imperative, not just a sop to marketing, was the fact that both co-Ceo’s addressed Sustainability at length in their keynote addresses.

In my interview with Diversey’s CEO Curt Johnson a few weeks back he made the point that

CO₂ is waste, so if you minimise CO₂, you minimise waste and you maximise efficiency and increase profits

In his keynote on Tuesday morning, SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe made the same point when he said that saving carbon emissions meant saving money. He concluded his keynote discussing SAP’s carbon reduction targets and how SAP’s sustainability solutions will help SAP’s customers reduce their emissions.

This ties in very strongly with the SAP Sustainability strategy which SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf set forth during his presentation. SAP are committing to being an Exemplar and Enabler. By that they mean SAP will be an exemplar organisation in terms of its own sustainability initiatives and through its software solutions, it will enable its client companies to do the same.

Peter told me some time back that though SAP’s CO₂ emissions were around 500,000 tonnes, their customers’ emissions were 10,000 times that! That’s a lot of emissions to be able to influence.

To that end, SAP’s on-demand Carbon Impact application seems to be coming along nicely now. I saw a pre-release of the upcoming version and it is starting to go beyond carbon impacts in terms of emission management, so I wonder how long before we have a re-brand! And SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management tool is a big help for companies wishing to track and communicate sustainability performance

SAP co-CEO's (and bottled water!)

I have written about how good their 2009 Sustainability Report was and how customers have been asking SAP to productise it. I asked Peter Graf during his presentation when he planned to deliver a Sustainability Report Generator to enable customers to also produce awesome sustainability reports but there are no imminent plans to release it it seems, which is a pity.

Despite the fact that both co-CEO’s had bottled water beside them during their keynotes at Sapphire Now (see pic), SAP have been quite consistently pushing the sustainability message for a while now. It is great to see. Hopefully some of SAP’s competitors will take note and the term Sustainability will go away because it will be synonymous with business as usual.

I attend a lot of conferences.

The two most recent ones I was at were both run by SAP. The first was the International SAP for Utilities conference in Munich, the second was the SAP TechEd conference in Vienna. Both events were very interesting for a variety of reasons but both conferences left a nasty (dry) taste in my mouth because the only water available to drink was bottled water!

What is the big deal about using bottled water, you ask?
Well, according to Food and Water Watch:

Bottled water wastes fossil fuels and water in production and transport, and when the water is drunk the bottles become a major source of waste. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Each one of those bottles required nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide, and benzene. Then, rather than being recycled, 86 percent of them are thrown away. Breaking down these plastics can take thousands of years, while their components seep into our water supplies.

And don’t just take their word for it, check out the NRDC’s page on bottled water. See also Lighterfootstep.com’s 5 Reasons not to drink Bottled Water and even Wikipedia’s entry on bottled water vs tap water, which tells us amongst other things that:

In the United States, bottled water costs between $0.25 and $2 per bottle while tap water costs less than US$0.01. In 1999, according to a NRDC study, U.S. consumers paid between 240 and 10,000 times more per unit volume for bottled water than for tap water. According to Bottledwaterblues.com, about 90% of manufacturer’s costs is from making the bottle, label, and cap.

What’s worse, a significant proportion of bottled water is simply tap water which has been bottled! No, really. Both Aquafina from PepsiCo and Dasani from The Coca-Cola Company originate from municipal water systems, for example!

Despite all that, an estimated 50 billion bottles of water are consumed per annum in the US and around 200 billion bottles globally.

Come on SAP. You are working hard on improving your sustainability message. And by and large are doing a good job at it but really, bottled water? In 2009?

Here’s my challenge to SAP (and all conference organisers) – make commitment that you will never again run a conference at a venue that can’t provide water dispensing machines, instead of bottled water.

Seriously, if you are negotiating with a venue about holding your event and you mention that that is a dealbreaker, they’ll provide the machines.

Sustainable SAP

Never run a conference at a venue that can’t provide water dispensing machines, instead of bottled water