New companies are exploiting Greenland’s increasingly melting ice and selling it in expensive wine bottles. The water is mainly served in starred restaurants. How entrepreneurs respond to climate change.
No less than 4,700 billion tons of ice has been lost from the Greenland ice sheet since 2002. “Enough to submerge the United States by half an inch,” the Polar Portal research center reported in February. The meltwater is potable, so the Greenland government decided to issue licenses to companies that can exploit it. This especially attracted brands with an exclusive character.
“The taste of 100,000 years” is the slogan of the Danish Inland Ice, the first producer to sell Greenlandic ice cream as a luxury product. With large ships, the Greenland team sails down the coast in search of broken ice sheets. “The water is so pure that it would be a shame to let it melt in the sea,” said founder Thomas Vildersboll, a Swede who previously worked in the oil sector.
,,We deliberately opted for an exclusive character and did not want our product to be in the supermarkets”, he explains. “Gin distillers and chocolatiers are also fans of our product, but we mainly sell the water to starred restaurants.”
In Europe you pay four euros, in China twelve
Vildersboll bottles the water in luxurious wine bottles with screw caps and sells it for four euros a bottle. In China, a bottle costs up to twelve euros.
To mine the ice, the company had to build a special boat. “We call him ‘the crusher’. He drills a hole in the large ice sheet and crushes the ice that goes straight into a tanker. After that it has to go quickly, because water should not stand still for too long. We carry out the necessary quality checks, filter the water and ship it to our bottling plants.”
At sea, Vildersboll works exclusively with Greenlanders. “The sea is very hostile. You need experienced seamen.” The extraction and transport cost the company about fifteen euro cents per litre.
Demarcated area
Any Greenland ice and water operator must be licensed. This only applies to a demarcated area and only ice that has crumbled in a natural way may be mined. In addition, each licensee pays a royalty to the Greenland government. According to Vildersboll, it is now half a euro cent per litre.
“The water is so abundant here, we never thought it would be so valuable,” Commerce Secretary Pele Broberg told Le Monde. In addition to the royalties, he hopes the exploitation will also create jobs in bottling plants and in the administration around them.
Inland Ice employs only Greenlandic sailors and the offices and factories are located in Sweden and Denmark. “We bottle the water in Sweden, so that less transport is needed and we therefore emit less,” says Vildersboll.
Water from Spitsbergen costs 80 euros
Extracting water from icebergs is not new. In 2015, Norwegian Jamal Qureshi founded the water brand Svalbarði, which mines its ice in the Norwegian archipelago Spitsbergen. The company calls itself the third most expensive water in the world with a price tag of 80 euros per 75 centilitre bottle.
The United Arab Emirates also want to tackle the global drinking water shortage. With the UAE-Iceberg Project, they want to tow a large iceberg from Antarctica to their coast to melt and sell it there.
According to the OECD, 40% of the population will face water scarcity by 2050. Greenland has 10 percent of all freshwater resources.
“That can be transported to countries with water scarcity, but there is no infrastructure,” says Vildersbøll. “It will have to be there someday. Water is the new oil.”