UK Sales of Bottled Water Face Environmental Backlash

[PointRadix]

The Daily Mail - 01:26am on 14th April 2008

After ten years of soaring business, the tide is starting to turn against bottled water. Shop sales were down by 9 per cent in the year to March to £284million, according to the retail analysts TNS. This follows a widespread backlash by environmentalists who condemn it as wasteful and even immoral. UK sales of bottled water had been growing at more than 6 per cent annually for more than a decade, reaching 2billion bottles a year.

One reason for its success is that many claim not to like the taste of what comes out of the tap. In some parts of the country there is a chlorine taint. However, blind taste tests by Decanter magazine put London tap water ahead of many brands transported at a premium price from as far away as Fiji. Fashionable labels have recently faced a combined onslaught from Government ministers, consumer groups and green campaigners. A 500ml bottle of a named brand typically costs 42p in a supermarket, or 84p a litre. That is 840 times the price of tap water, which comes in at 0.1p a litre.

Among the environmental costs of bottled water are the energy needed for production, transport and disposal of the bottles. Compared with tap water, it generates more than 5,000 times the amount of carbon emissions per litre. Transporting bottled water in Britain is estimated to produce 33,200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to the annual energy use of 6,000 homes.

The Government's Food Standards Agency has banned bottled water from its offices along with an increasing number of Whitehall departments, including Downing Street. At the same time, restaurateurs across the country have been shamed into offering diners tap water rather than premium bottles costing several pounds. Encouraged by marketing campaigns stressing its apparent health benefits, many consumers have switched to bottled water in recent years as an alternative to fizzy drinks - particularly sparkling water, which accounts for a quarter of bottled sales. They increasingly tend, however, to refill their bottles from the tap.

The food and health lobby group, Sustain, has been running a campaign to put pressure on Government departments and official bodies to switch to tap water. Campaigns director Richard Watts said: "This looks to be the first ever recorded fall in bottled water sales. "It is a significant development. The message about bottled water being unnecessary, expensive and damaging to the environment is finally getting through. "Around the world, the authorities in cities like San Francisco and, more recently, London, are making determined moves against bottled water. The backlash has clearly started."

The Consumer Council for Water's chairman, Dame Yve Buckland, said: "The bottled water industry spends millions investing in their brands and that's what people are paying for when they pick up a bottle of water. "There is no health advantage in drinking bottled water instead of water from the tap."

Source: Sales of bottled water fall 9 per cent after environmental backlash | the Daily Mail

[Susi]

It's very strange to me when people refuse to drink out of the tap. It's the same bloody thing. It's water. There's nothing different between them. ,-, My friend, her family, and our mutual friend (I don't know if there's more people I know..) refuse outright to drink tap water. They say it's "dirty". Maybe a quality of those with lots of money to waste? Who knows? It's really weird to me, this bottled water phenomenon. I sometimes do buy a bottle of water (very rarely) when I'm out and about if I've forgotten to fill my own because there aren't really any public taps here.

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Susi

It's very strange to me when people refuse to drink out of the tap. It's the same bloody thing. It's water. There's nothing different between them. ,-, My friend, her family, and our mutual friend (I don't know if there's more people I know..) refuse outright to drink tap water. They say it's "dirty". Maybe a quality of those with lots of money to waste? Who knows? It's really weird to me, this bottled water phenomenon. I sometimes do buy a bottle of water (very rarely) when I'm out and about if I've forgotten to fill my own because there aren't really any public taps here.

I drink water from the tap.

Allegedly in some countries water from the tap is not of good quality for drinking, so people use bottled water instead. I don't think UK is one of such countries. So your friends drinking exclusively bottled water might be due to the effects of advertising and nothing else.

[Sergius]

When I travel, I am often adviced by Danes not to drink water from the tap. In many places it doesn't taste like water, so not drinking it isn't hard. Prague has the worst water I've had in Europe. NYC water wins the international competition. No wonder Americans are so fat - tap water tastes like shit, you can't buy fruit juice actually made from fruits, their beer is a joke, and their wine is an abomination. What's left, then? Soda.

[PointRadix]

Some further perspectives (from American source, but still of general interest to this topic).

Quote:

Often times, however, bottled water is merely tap water repackaged -- and it isn't always clean. The National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group of 1.2 million members, recently tested bottled water for chemical abnormalities. While the majority of the water came back clean, the NRDC said, "About 22 percent of the brands we tested contained, in at least one sample, chemical contaminants at levels above strict state health limits. If consumed over a long period of time, some of these contaminants could cause cancer or other health problems."

Bottled water has recently been linked to cancer because of its plastic container. In the latest issue of Cancer Research, the official journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, a report showed the link between a bisphenol A, a chemical that seeps into food from manufactured products, and breast cancer. The chemical, which is found in water bottles, causes healthy human breast cells to show genealogical characteristics of cancerous cells.

And bottled water certainly isn't healthy for the environment. According to the Pacific Institute, a tax-exempt environmental research organization, bottled water production for the United States alone required more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006 -- not including its transportation. On top of that, production created more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. The Pacific Institute also estimated that it took 3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of bottled water.

From: Some Businesses Boot Bottled Water - Money News Story - KMBC Kansas City

[Susi]

I prefer the tap water at home, which is drawn from a community wellsource rather than a well polluted lake. (I think this is why the New York City water is shitty because it's most likely drawn from the River which is really polluted).