Panorama’s programme last night on bottle water did little for the rather over priced Fiji water brand. It’s a reflection of our green times that this programme was made. 10 years ago no one cared about bottled water but now it’s becoming as socially unacceptable as smoking.
As I’ve previously mentioned in my Blog on Tappening, in some restaurants in New York bottled water is up there, or maybe down there, with smoking. The US has a strong movement against bottled water and numerous bans. With few supporters, and little defence, it is only a matter of time before the UK follows.
The Panorama programmed highlighted just how mad bottled water has got with some brands selling for £21 a bottle. Claridges has over 30 different waters. Yet in a tasting some people rated Thames tap water as best. This is not the first time, Which also had a similar result many years ago.
The myth that bottled water is good for you is largely a myth based on the illusion of purity. In fact many waters are bad. One Swedish brand has high levels of salts – resulting in raised blood pressure. Many contain dubious trace elements and worse, bacteria. Few brands would actually meet EC tap water regulations. Visit mineralwaters.org if you want to be shocked.
The programme’s presenter, Tom Heap, managed to make a strong ethical point that bottled water really doesn’t have any reason to exist. Even ethical brands like Belu and Thirsty Planet, who support water aid projects, have to face the fact that few bottles (about a quarter) get recycled and most end up in landfill. Even if you are producing biodegradable bottles there’s the carbon footprint of transport to consider too.
Heap pointed out that the carbon footprint of Thames tap water was 0.3g, compared to 185g for one well know water brands.
We often forget that plastic comes from petroleum and if you used all the energy trapped in all the bottles we use in a year you could run 17,000 cars on it.
The other problem is that most bottled water drinkers just dump their bottles. Our beaches are littered with them. What Heap didn’t touch on was something so dramatic it’s worth of a programme itself – the 100 million tons of flotsam that is in our oceans. These are vast soup of garbage, mainly plastic, that moves around our seas.
9 out of 10 Fulmars (it’s a sea bird) have been found to have plastic in their guts., with the average bird ingested 44 plastic items. In the case of one dead bird there were over 1,600 plastic items in its stomach. This plastic floating garbage patch – twice the size of the US - is also killing turtles, fish, whales and wiping other many other forms of marine life.
The final blow is that over a billion people round the world don't have access to safe drinking water. While the rich in the West indulge themselves to the figure of £2 billion annually, poor people in the third world are dying from lack of clean water. Fiji was one place highlighted because while the Fiji water plant is exporting water, one third of Fijians don’t have clean water.
When bottled water first started to market itself few though it’d become the trend it has. But then few water brands imagined that one day our concern with the environment what be a death blow. The tend now is towards filtered tap water.
For the bottled water industry the writing’s on the wall. Tap water is cool and bottled water is getting the cold shoulder.
To end of a bizarre note… in the States bottled water doesn’t have to meet water regulations, that’s because it’s a food. Puzzled? According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), bottled water is a food product, not drinking water. Only in America!
In Fiji Water's response to the international outcry of how they are making hundreds of millions of dollars by stealing the water resources of Fiji - I quote the following response from Fiji Water:
"The real irony is that you suggest that exporting water somehow reduces access to this precious resource, when in fact our export revenue is paying for the expansion of water access at a pace that Fiji's government has never achieved. What if we didn't bottle the water? The underground flow would simply run into the ocean and fewer people in Fiji would benefit from access to clean, safe water."
First: If the government of Fiji were to nationalize Fiji Water and bottle and sell their country's water for their own income - they would solve their country's water woes in a few years.
Second: All life on land and in our ocean is based on a hydrologic system that has evolved over billions of years. Freshwater flowing from land into the ocean is rare - since there is so little freshwater created by the hydrologic cycle. The relatively small amount freshwater the flows into the ocean is vital to all life on Earth. In the coastal zone where fresh and salt water mix - we find more life being created than almost anywhere else on Earth. Thus, we find the foundation for ocean's food chain being created in the coastal zone.
When freshwater is diverted from entering the coastal zone - there is less life being created. Therefore, it only takes common sense to understand that life on Earth evolved and is supported by such mingling of fresh and saltwater. For some reason - I don't believe nature meant for freshwater to be placed inside a plastic bottle - since I have yet to see any life forms being created inside a plastic bottle.
CHRIS ARNOLD
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 19 Nov 2009
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