October 20, 2005

 The bottled water industry uses environmentally unsound processes and is wasteful, says Lucy Siegle. Tap into a source that’s much closer to home

Bottled mineral water has its own mythology. As teenagers, my friends and I were convinced that there was a correlation between the amount drunk and the likelihood of becoming a super model, so we necked gallons of the stuff and happily contributed to the phenomenal growth of the bottled water industry. Between 1993 and 2003, the UK market grew from 580 litres a year to two billion.

`It struck me that 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, for that matter, oil,’ an ex-CEO of a reputed company once said, revealing that while marketing (15 per cent of the cost of a bottle of water, apparently) might feature the Alps, suggesting purity and health, most bottled water wasn’t exactly lovingly sourced from artisan wells.

In fact, even the expensive,`bottled-at-source’ water is typically derived via an environmentally taxing method, which involves it being extracted from municipal water sources and filtered in a process that loses two gallons of water for every single gallon bottled. Increasingly, bottled water relies on depleted aquifers in water-scarce areas. Presumably the reasoning is that they can just buy it back. A Ghanaian family, for example, can expect to spend around 20 per cent of its annual budget on water.

You could, of course, keep it local. Ethical Consumer rates Abbey Well in Morpeth as one of the most environmentally extracted UK waters. But generally, today’s water world is all about the big boys. Malvern, for example, that most famous of English waters, is a subsidiary of a popular soft drink company. Last year, the company announced plans to quadruple its extraction efforts in the Malvern hills, increasing production from 2.6m litres to 11.3m litres per year. It was only a robust protest campaign from local conservationists that convinced it to put these plans on ice.

Meanwhile, Indian activists have singled out another popular soft drink company’s bottled water operations. This time it’s about the bottles rather than the extraction. Their production involves the creation of toxic by-products, which reside in the air, ground and water. To add insult to injury, the bottles are, apparently, for export to Europe and the USA, and there’s a chance they will be returned after use for `reprocessing’, causing even more pollution.

The single-use plastic water bottle now accounts for 500,000 tonnes of non-biodegradable rubbish each year in the UK. Meanwhile, research reveals that you can wash and reuse your plastic water bottles without them becoming a `breeding ground for bacteria. Just select your favourite empty, then turn on your kitchen tap to reveal a miraculous source of potable water that is 500-1000 times cheaper than the bottled variety, and subject to much tighter regulations. If you’re still worried about purity, invest in a home purification system. Then simply fill a bottle and go with the sustainable flow.

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