Bottlers tap into muddied springs with organic-water claims

Elise Dalley of the Pure Plastiky investigative project reports from Sydney.

Bottled water labelled "organic" may be breaking an Australian Standard, which prevents use of the term in relation to water, Standards Australia says.

The Australian Standard for Organic and Bio Dynamic Products, introduced in 2009, says natural products such as water cannot be collected, harvested or processed and labelled as organic.

Major brand Organic Springs, as well as Active Organic and Organic Falls, use trademarks and registered company names as a basis for their names rather than anything to do with the quality of their product.

Advertisement: Story continues below Active Organic sells purified tap water under the Active Organic Spring brand name, despite being neither organic nor spring water. The water is identical to other purified tap water brands.

The company repeatedly refused to comment about its water, despite being subject to an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, brought about by a rival bottled water brand, Nature's Best.

The ACCC has not yet reached a finding but said: "Details of [the] complaint will be used in the context of the ACCC's ongoing monitoring to determine whether there is a pattern of behaviour by Active Organic Pty Ltd or a pattern within the retailing industry that may raise broader concerns."

Legitimate organic producers are annoyed that others are using the word as part of their brand names.

True organics
"By definition, when you look at international standards, water, salt and minerals can't be organic and this is because they are not of agricultural origin," the director of Biological Farmers Australia, Holly Vyner, said.

"For something to be organic, it has to have been cultivated."

An Organic Falls spokesman, Harold Newman, said the company did not make any specific claims that its water was organic, despite taking out a trademark for the company name.

"The way I see it is that we are actually not making a specific claim that our water is organic.

"Our water claims to be Australian still spring water, which is clearly set out on the label and at no stage of the product's inception was it padded off as organic water," Newman said.

If Organic Falls were to be questioned by the ACCC for misleading consumers, Mr Newman said it would be open to change, although the company stood by its assertion that water should be able to be labelled as organic.

First Water owner, Steve Stack, whose labels include popular supermarket brand Organic Springs and Oz20, said that, while he acknowledged water was not organic, he did not feel that marketing his Kulnura spring water as organic was misleading to customers.

Source water
"Everybody knows water is an inorganic compound, so you can't certify water as organic. The next best thing, we believe, is bottling water at the source; our farm is organic, so we think that our brand name is not misleading in that regard.

"We believe that, of all products in the marketplace, if any of them should have the word organic, ours is one," Stack said.

The director of Total Environment Centre, Jeff Angel, said the use of labels such as organic bottled water was part of a bigger problem of companies making environmental claims.

Regardless of trademark law and freedom to register a company name, regulation should be based on word association and what the consumer sees with their own eyes on the supermarket shelf, Angel said.

"The copyrighting of the term makes no difference to the consumer, they see what they see."

The centre launched a campaign in 2008 against greenwashing, which has included a push to have a number of core words protected, or restricted, under trademark legislation, to prevent what Angel describes as a legal escape from trade practices legislation.

The food policy adviser at consumer organisation Choice, Clare Hughes, agreed and said more must be done by government to protect consumer confidence in premium organic products against irresponsible manufacturers.

"While [the code] is not yet mandatory, we'd expect any responsible business operating in Australia to act in good faith and comply with the standard.

"If they're not, there would have to be a very good reason why," she said.

Elise Dalley is a freelance  journalist based at the ACIJ. The story is part of Pure Plastiky, a project of the Global Environmental Journalism Initiative and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. This story was originally published by The Sydney Morning Herald and republished by PMC Online by permission from the ACIJ.