Bottled Water - Latest Battleground in the Eco War

8/14/2019 Bottled Water - Latest Battleground in the Eco War

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It's just water, right? Wrong. Bottled

water is set to be the latest battleground

in the eco warLucy Siegle, The Observer, Sunday 10th Feb 2008

When the National Consumer Council recently investigated 'ripoff mineral water' in restaurants, it

found one in five people 'slightly nervous' or 'too scared' to ask for tap water.

Laura Taylor is evidently cut from different cloth to these timid respondents. 'I'll have a glass of tap

water please, no ice,' she announces, with a polite, decisive smile, snapping shut the menu at one of

London's notquite exclusive restaurants earlier this week. She is firm, to the point and unflinching in her

tap water request. The waitress doesn't so much as raise an eyebrow.

Taylor, 36, who works for a charity, is neither a cheapskate nor an ecowarrior but hates the idea of

bottled water. 'I just don't see the point of paying for water when tap water is completely fine,' she says.

The act of unashamedly specifying tap water is a growing trend across major cities in developed

economies. It's a trend buoyed by consumers rediscovering the tap in their own homes, with tales of

carrying refillable bottles of home or filtered tap water to the gym, to the o ffice and even to schools. In

the US, camping shops selling metal water bottles report a huge increase in sales as the bottledwater

bottle supplants the plastic bag as the ultimate symbol of unsustainable profligacy.

The tide appears to be turning. During the summer, UK sales of the main brands of bottled water fell by

3.4 per cent year on year, and 8.1 per cent for own brands, according to recent statistics from the

Grocer magazine, although admittedly these were attributed to a terrible summer rather than a

burgeoning environmental consciousness. It is too early to proclaim the demise of the 2bn British

water industry, but the industry that was b orn when, as an exchief executive of Perrier once put it, he

realised 'all you had to do is take the water out of the ground and then sell it for more than the price of

wine, milk or oil,' would appear to be losing its charms.

Britons still consume 3bn litres of bottled water a year, and there lies the ecological rub, which starts

with packaging. Most bottled water is siphoned into PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles; of 13bn

plastic bottles sold in the UK last year, just 3bn were recycled.

As recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum

feedstocks. It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) just to

manufacture a onelitre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions (10 balloons full of CO2)

per empty bottle. Extrapolate this for the developed world (2.4m tonnes of plastic are used to bottle


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water each year) and it represents serious oil use for what is essentially a singleuse object. To make the

29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world's biggest consumer of bottled water, requires

more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year.

Given that water bottles suffer from lamentable recycling and reuse rates (the screw caps are usually of

an unidentified plastic that doesn't fit into most local authority recycling schemes), the question is: what

happens to our enormous pile of empties? The answer isn't encouraging. Most are landfilled (Americans

throw 30m water bottles into landfill every day) or, in the UK, increasingly incinerated, where only a tiny

proportion of their energy value can be recovered; the rest becomes environmental pollution,

particularly in the ocean where, as the plastic slowly fragments, it poses a serious threat to wildlife .

Later this year, environmental campaigner David de Rothschild will set off across the Pacific Ocean in a

boat made from waste water bottles highlighting the impact of such consumer dependencies. Hisvoyage will take him through the Eastern Garbage Patch, the rubbishstrewn region which comprises

hundreds of miles of the northern Pacific. It was first encountered by researchers in 1999; they counted

a million pieces of plastic per square mile, almost all of it less than a few millimetres across.

The bottled water industry will find it increasingly hard to write off water bottle pollution as a merely

aesthetic issue. The research nets appear to be closing in. 'I am absolutely not clear why we need

bottled water,' says Dr Richard Thompson, a marine scientist from Plymouth University, 'when we have

one of the best municipal water setups in the world.'

His main preoccuption is with plastic: 'We've now tracked plastics particles smaller than a human hair,to 20 microns,' says Thompson, 'and we've found nine different polymers, consistent with water bottles,

all over the UK and further afield as well.' It would appear the impact of bottled water runs far deeper

than abstract litter.

The footprint doesn't end there. Globally, nearly a quarter of all bottled water crosses national borders

to reach consumers. There are many horror stories of air freighted 'status' waters, but in reality the

journey of bottled water normally includes boat, train and truck journeys that can still rack up

considerable water miles and ensuing carbon emissions. In 2004 for example, Nord Water of Finland

bottled and shipped 1.4m bottles of Finnish tap water 4,300 kilometres from its bottling plant in Helsinki

to Saudi Arabia. Fiji wa ter a particularly potent symbol of excess, according to campaigners, which canapparently 'trace its origins to rainfall more than 400 years ago in the Fijian mountains' makes a

journey of 10,000 miles to get to UK supermarket shelves.

Overall, the ecological burden of carting bottled water internationally (a quarter of all the bottled water

we drink comes from France) and between source, bottling plants and central distribution points in the

UK generates 30,100 tonnes of CO2

Then there's the extraction, rarely from the homespun operation you might readily associate with

artesian wells. Bottled water is big business, requiring industrial extraction and huge bottling plants. In


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the UK, CocaCola owns Malvern Hills water and a licence from the Environment Agency to draw 40m

litres a year from the springs.

Naturally, the water industry argues that is it lately more sinned against than sinning; the British Bottled

Water Producers (BBWP) point out that, because natural waters must be free from pollution,

commercially exploited springs in the UK are some of the best managed environments in the country.

'Few other industries, except perhaps organic farming,' Jo Jacobius of the BBWP insists, 'play such a

major role in protecting the countryside, doing much to minimise environmental damage.'

In a marked change from the more provocative stance that saw the launch of 'status' waters such as

Bling H2O, replete in a glass bottle adorned with Swarovski crystals, the water industry is seemingly on

an eco drive. Last week Danone Waters UK (owners of market leaders Evian and Volvic) announced a

pilot water bottle recycling scheme in Glasgow, and highlighted the way Evian plastic bottles concertinadown (you need to be quite strong) after use to minimise space in the recycling truck. Nestl has

responded with a new ecoshaped bottle that uses 30 per cent less plastic than a standard halflitre

bottle and now even Fiji water plans to become 'carbon negative' by 2010.

These are changes that the industry hopes will pacify very lightgreen consumers, some of whom have

already changed to glass bottles in an effort to reduce their H2O footprint. Although there is a well

established route for glass recycling in the UK, this is not quite the panacea many consumers imagine;

glass is much heavier, so increases transport emissions and there remains a surfeit of glass in the UK.

In any case, overall recycling rates are still low. Similarly, the drive towards biodegradable bottles(notably the Belu brand) doesn't yet stack up ecologically. Although made from cornstarch, the bottles

take months to biodegrade in a domestic compost heap, requiring an industrial composting facility.

However, as there are no separate collections, consumers either put them in the bin or in their

recycling.

These kinds of measures look unlikely to unseat a backlash, already established in the US: last year, New

York City launched a campaign to persuade people to cut back on bottled water use and return to good

old tap wa ter (officials claim it's the finest in the world); San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom banned

city employees from using 'public money' to buy anything so ludicrous as imported water; while Chicago

mayor Richard Daley brought in a fivecentsabottle tax on plastic bottles from the start of the year tolimit the strain on municipal waste systems (currently the subject of a legal challenge from the water

industry). On 1 February, the House of Representatives launched an investigation into the effect bottled

water manufacturers have on health.

And this is a backlash that travels. When Labour MP John Spellar began to ask questions about bottled

water use in the House of Commons, the answer 'a total of 105,957 litres of bottled water was sold by

the House of Commons Refreshment Department in 200607' was shocking. Campaign organisation

Sustain (the Alliance for Better Food and Farming), which thinks bottled water should just be for

emergencies, is awaiting responses from all UK central and local government departments to ascertain


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which are drinking from the tap and which are still using public money to buy mineral water.

Meanwhile, Jenny Jones, a Green party member of the London Assembly, has thrown in her lot with

Thames Water (which has a vested interest in persuading us to drink from the tap), launching a

campaign based on a successful run in Paris where leading restaurants have been offering Pierre Cardin

carafes full of tap water instead of mineral water. 'I'd love a chain to get involved, like Pizza Express,' she

says. 'It's really about time we sorted out such unnecessary waste.'

When Arthur Potts Dawson, the chef behind London's Acorn House, launched his new restaurant

Waterhouse last week, there wasn't a bottle of water in sight. 'When we started Acorn House we didn't

know if the consumer would do without bottled water; we found it was 50/50. Now we're ready to do

without.' He won't supply bottled water even if c ustomers beg for it. Instead he's installed a 'top of the

range' filtration system for which diners will be charged a small cover charge. 'It's just about loweringimpact of what we're doing. I'm not making a comment on choice, but just imagine how much traffic

we'd take off the road for starters by not ferrying all that water about. How much of those trucks are full

of water?'

Continue in this vein and the fact that Claridge's has a 32strong mineral water menu and that you

routinely see 40 brands of water on the shelves of a mediumsized supermarket will start to look

ridiculous. Food and Water Watch emphasises the fact that bottling water depletes groundwater,

increases toxic emissions and damages road and other infrastructure. In the near future, those who

carry a pristine water bottle could look like bad citizens.

It's a reversal of what Andrew Szasz, the US sociology professor and author of EcoPopulism, calls

'inverted quarantine', a selfcentred form of consumerism where we are so focused on minimising

exposure to toxins that we ignore the wider environmental ramifications. Equally chillingly, Szasz insists

it results in a type of 'political anaesthesia', especially when it comes to bottled water.

'It is estimated that hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be spent in the next decades to keep the

nation's public water infrastructure in good repair, to keep up with growing demand and to upgrade

water purification to deal with new pollutants,' he claims. 'With a substantial portion of the population

drinking bottled water and/or filtering their wa ter, what is the likelihood that politicians will hear from

their constituents that they should be voting to make that necessary investment?'

Arguably, consumers have also switched on to the deeperrunning ethical argument: the one that

questions why they are paying massive corporations through the nose for clean water, something that

1.3 billion people don't have access to. Collectively we spend five times more on bottled water each year

than it would cost to eradicate the 1.8 million deaths of children attributable to waterborne illness each

year.

By 2025, it's estimated that demand will exceed supply by over 50 per cent, leaving 5 billion p eople

without access to clean water. The only people salivating at this prospect are the City traders furiously


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buying 'wet stocks' in privatised water.

The latest beverage research from Mintel states that '2008 will be the beginning of a significant backlash

against plain bottled water'. For the industry, it will be especially troublesome that the antibottled

water brigade actually have an ecofriendly alternative.

It transpires that our everyday hydration (eight glasses a day is generally thought a good amount) can

be met by a low carbon footprint (the mains structure is comparatively efficient and uses little energy)

that is rigorously tested (by the Drinking Water Inspectorate) to standards above and beyond its bo ttled

cousin and which in the event of any contamination would be immediately recalled again, this is not

the case for bottled water. All we consumers need do is to turn on the tap.

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Bottled Water - Latest Battleground in the Eco War