Bottling Out
News that the Australian town of Bundanoon has become the first in the world to ban the sale of bottled water has brought renewed attention to what many people regard as one of the most wasteful and environmentally damaging industries around. It takes huge resources to extract, package and distribute bottled water, only for hundreds of millions of discarded bottles to end up in landills – where it may never degrade. Every molecule of plastic ever made which has not been manually changed to a different form still exists in nature.
Bottled water is a multi-billion pound business, yet the product itself is tasteless, colourless and odourless. It’s drunk in the name of good health, even though the World Health Organisation says that most tap water in Britain is perfectly drinkable.
We spend about £2 billion a year on bottled water in this country, even importing it from as far aield as Hawaii, New Zealand and Fiji, where one third of the population does not have access to safe drinking water.
Said Tim Lang, the Government’s natural resources commissioner: “We have to make people think that drinking bottled water is unfashionable, just as we have with smoking.” Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added: “?ur amount of water spent on mineral water borders on being morally unacceptable.”
- Around 200 billion bottles of water are sold globally every year. If they were all lined up together, they would stretch to the moon and back 56 times.
- It takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture a one litre plastic bottle. The amount of water it takes every year to manufacture all the world’s plastic bottles would ill Loch Lomond over 120 times.
- A litre of bottled water generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water. n Only about a quarter of plastic bottles are recycled.
The ‘in’ bottle
If you’ve managed to wean yourself off bottled water and onto the perfectly potable tap stuff, but still can’t bear walking around without a name brand bottle in your hand, you can keep up appearances with a reusable designer bottle from the Swiss manufacturer SIGG.
The company produces over 100 new designs every year - this year’s collection includes two limited edition bottles by the late American artist Keith Haring – and has products in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The bottles are free of chemicals, light, durable and leak-proof. A special ‘EcoLiner’ ensures there is no smell or taste transfer. With cafe chains like Starbucks and Costa now supplying free water, there’s no reason to be dehydrated. From £9.99, www.sigg.com/p>