AUARA

Auara, water with values

Friday 9 June 2017, by annabernadp@gmail.com

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A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

Auara is a social company that sells natural mineral water - which comes from a spring in León (Spain)-, and that spends the total amount of its dividends on social projects to provide drinking water to the places where it is currently not available.

The company does not just give money to ONGs or non-profit organization, but instead of it, they collaborate with local partners who are near the areas where people lack access to water, in tracking and participating in the projects promoted. The projects are highly monitored and posted in their website, in order to maintain the investors well informed about where the money is going and how is it being managed.

The projects are focused on three main areas based on water:
-  Access to clean water
-  Sanitation
-  Agriculture

The company is highly involved in protecting the environment; therefore they have created their bottle of water using 100% recycled PET, meaning that the raw material that they use is not coming from fossil resources but from plastic already used. By doing so, they are not polluting or generating more plastic residues but giving second use to plastic that would have probably thrown away. In order to create these bottles, they have used a technology called “supercycle”.

In addition, the bottles have been designed to be more efficient in terms of transport optimization, which has given the opportunity to increase up to 20%, more bottles per pallet than a traditional format.

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

The challenges that the company is addressing takes into account the whole population of this planet. Auara is not only helping people in order to assure them such an important basic need as water but also protecting the environment to foster sustainable human activities that do not damage our planet.

The company’s main objectives until 2020 are to ensure access to drinking water to 50.000 people, avoid the use of 10 million liters of petroleum in PET ( a type of plastic widely used in beverage and textile packaging), to invest 2.5€ million in social projects and also reuse plastic of 90 million of bottles.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

Besides its activities, Auara has been rewarded with a Social Enterprise Mark (SEM) by a British organization that aims to ensure that companies that define themselves as "social enterprises" fulfill a number of aspects that really distinguish them from others in a convincing way.

SEM has established a set of basic and internationally applicable principles for organizations worldwide that want to demonstrate that their business model follows ethical principles and that they endure over time as they are periodically verified by an independent Panel that continuously monitors The fulfillment of the commitments of the company. Auara is the fourth company outside the United Kingdom and the first in Spain which has gone through the certification process established by SEM.

In addition Auara is the first company in Europe to use bottles with 100% of reused plastic and its transparency regarding their implication and their actions in social projects, forces us to truly believe in the ethical values of the company.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

Recent researches show that we will suffer severe water shortages by 2050 due to multiple factors, including climate change. In 35 years, countries where nearly half of the world’s population lives can face a high risk and water scarcity. This would involve that people who nowadays is able to drink water, would not have access to it in the future.

Therefore, we think that the company should also try to influence how people are acting regarding the climate change problems. Improving the promotion of the company would not only help them to get more costumers but would also make them more conscious about the benefits of drinking from a bottle of water that helps people and protects the environment. They need to share their values, so people can use it as a way of life, and that would have a huge impact on society.

Bibliography

Location: MADRID (SPAIN)

Sector: Water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation activities

Official website: https://www.auara.org/

Nbr. visits: 360