Bottled water from Greenland glacier wins environmental shame award

A luxury water brand that is made from the melted icebergs of Greenland received an annual environmental award for the most absurd product, the Swiss Alpine Initiative announced on Tuesday.

"The melted Greenland glacier ice is transported over 9,600 kilometres. Given the melting polar ice caps, this seems especially cynical," said the activist group that hands out the "Devil's Stone" award each year.

The Berg water brand is made by a Canadian company that harvests blocks of floating Greenland ice and brings them ashore for bottling.

The bottles are then shipped across the Atlantic from Halifax to Antwerp, where they are loaded onto trucks that drive them across Europe to Switzerland.

Department stores

A spokeswoman of the Manor department stores that sell the water in Switzerland told that her company had decided already earlier this year that it would stop selling Berg and other foreign water brands.

"We take the feedback from the public and our customers very seriously," she said.

Nearly 6,000 people participated in the Alpine Initiative's voting for the Devil's Stone this year.

The shortlist also included pickled gherkins that are sourced from Vietnam rather than from Swiss farms, as well as pomegranate seeds from Peru that are processed in Egypt before being flown to Switzerland.