Earth Water (http://www.earthwater.ca/)

In a recent class of mine we had the CEO of a global water bottle company come in to present to us. Now when you think of a CEO, you think of an older, dressed up person who seems to have a large presence. That is completely not who walked in. Instead was a former U of A political science graduate who seems to be about 3-4 years older than this. He was dressed in a scraggly green t-shirt and blue jeans. He wasn't really one of the more impressive speakers as he spoke in a low voice, kinda fidgeted etc... but the content of his presentation was huge. His tag line of the presentation was, if you had the chance to, would you change the world? I can't really remember what his name was... Kori something?

His story starts with how he got inspired. He was backpacking in some mountain range when his group ran into a sherpa also walking up the same trail. It was of interest to them because he was being paid something shitty like 25 cents a day to haul this huge backpack thing. Now, they're curious what could possibly be in this huge thing and take a look; its stacks of cans of Coca-Cola. Apparently he is taking it up to a tourist spot so people can buy pop. Not much to be said here because the message here seems quite clear.

So, Kori decides to do the exact opposite. His goal is to create a corporation that takes social responsibility to the next level. Besides paying his employees a decent wage and retaining earnings to increase growth, 100% of his corporation's profits are donated to the U.N.

Earth Water is a very interesting product because it is the only item to have the U.N. logo on it and endorsing it. The U.N. did this while creating a contract that Earth Water donates 100% of its net profits. I think its amazing to do this and think its definitely worth the time to check out the website.

Its amazing what people can do asKori related the scale of each end of it. When creating the contract for Earth Water with the U.N., the U.N. had a team of 11 lawyers. In Kori's corner? A lawyer working pro bono on hand through cell phone because there wasn't money to fly the lawyer over to the contract negotiations.

There is actually a lot more neat things to bring up, but I'm going to end with a thought on one of their most innovative ideas. Kori spoke of how in certain disaster areas relief teams will fly in and drop loads of water bottles. While this is pretty much the only way to get drinking water in there, it creates a problem by causing gigantic mounds of water bottles. There really isn't anyway to get rid of them. So, right now they are working on creating this Lego-shaped water bottle that could be dropped instead. What is fascinating about this? Once the water has been finished out of the bottle, it can be filled with sand to make "bricks". Than these bricks can be put together to construct a shelter! ...Just wow...

In other news, there is Alex Rodriguez. Yeah.. $350 M? I'm not going to get into the specifics of it because its not really as simple as it looks, but its pretty astounding how we can get the extremes of what people are trying to do in the world...