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Starbucks Ethos all wet

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Can bottled water save the world? Starbucks believes Ethos Water can. But what’s the eco-conscious trendsetter doing bottling this premium resource in the first place?

What the label won’t tell you:

Ethos’s goal is to raise $10 million by 2010 for water projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America by donating 10 cents from the sale of every bottle. The catch? Ethos is making a killing in the process. A bottle retails for $2.35 in Canada.

It’s marketed as “natural spring water,” taken from Tomhicken Mountain Springs in Hazelton, Pennsylvania. But what about the cost in greenhouse gas we’re paying to truck the water to Starbucks stores across North America?

Did we mention that Ethos signed a five-year, $10 million distribution deal with PepsiCo, whose massive bottled water operations are depleting supplies the world over?

The bottles are recyclable, but in the U.S. more than 1.5 million barrels of oil are burned every year to produce plastic for water bottles. The ecological kick in the head: many of those bottles still end up in landfill.

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