Finns Bottle Tap Water for Export

With a virtually endless supply of the world's cleanest groundwater, Finland's capital Helsinki has formed a company to bottle and sell tap water.

Nord Water got its first bulk order in January, to deliver 1.4 million bottles of water to Saudi Arabia, and now is vying for an extension that could multiply by ten its business in the desert country.

With a staff on only eight, the firm has a long way to go before it can claim to compete with heavyweights like Danone, which sells 1.5 billion liters of Evian each year, but Nord Water says it has a competitive edge in coming from a country that topped the United Nations 2003 water quality indicator.

Hundreds of millions of liters of water are processed every day at the Helsinki water authority, where Nord Water's bottling plant is located.

The source is one of more than 56,000 sizeable lakes in the Nordic country, one-tenth of which is covered with water. Helsinki Water has environmental clearance to use up to five times more than the 70 billion liters it produced in 2002.

Nord Water is not the only Finnish firm trying to profit from the country's image of cleanliness and the global shortage of water. Privately owned Heinolan Viqua boasts that its Vellamo brand is "the purest natural mineral water on earth" and Finn Spring Oy says it lies "far from big cities – as a part of the unspoiled Finnish nature."

Source: CNN