Fancy some Just Born Spring Drops from India, or some Cloud Juice from Australia? Nip down to Claridge’s and you can get some liquid refreshment from either of these drinks, or one of the hotel’s other 28 exotic bottled waters.
The waters are brought in from all corners of the globe and range in price from £5 to £50 a litre. Some are said to aid digestion, others are good with salads, and one or two apparently complement sushi.
Most people’s passion for bottled water doesn’t extend this far, but we still buy it in enormous quantities. Here in the UK, we drink more than two billion litres each year. Tap water is often seen as an inferior drink, a bit cheap and embarrassing to ask for in a restaurant.
But in a growing number of cities, such as San Francisco, New York and Paris, drinking tap water is becoming the trendy green choice. Several restaurants have decided to stop serving bottled water altogether because of concerns over the environmental impact of making, transporting and disposing of billions of bottles.
Here in the UK, green campaigners are also supporting the tap. “Selling water in bottles and burning massive quantities of fossil fuel for its transportation does not make economic or environmental sense,” says Jenny Jones, Green Party member for the London Assembly.
“Most containers for bottled water are made from non-degradable plastics, which take 450 years to break down when disposed of in landfill sites. Even glass bottles of water still take a lot of energy to crush and recycle,” she adds.
One recent study calculated that the bottled water industry in the UK generates annually about 33,200 tonnes of CO2 emissions. That is just a little less than the electricity consumption of 20,000 households and the equivalent to the annual energy needs of 6000 homes.
Recycling and packaging
There are more than 200 different brands of bottled water on our supermarket shelves. The biggest selling are names like Evian and Volvic, which travel up to 600 miles to reach us. Most of the bottles are made from non-biodegradable plastic and only about a quarter are recycled, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme.
In its defence, the bottled water industry claims that it is making moves to be greener. The Bottled Water Information Office (BWIO), which represents several big brands including Volvic and Evian, says recycling rates are increasing and the industry continues to make inroads into packaging technology.
“The industry has already reduced the weight of packaging by 30 per cent,” says Richard Laming, spokesperson for the BWIO. “Individual manufacturers are committed to introducing energy efficiencies and some producers have started experimenting with biodegradable forms of plastic.”
One company experimenting with a different type of packaging is Belu Water, which introduced a biodegradable bottle made from cornstarch (PLA). The problem is that the bottles don’t break down easily in home compost systems, and that commercial compost collections will generally not take them.
Now Belu wants the bottles to be recycled instead, even though founder Reed Paget is aware that recycling companies do not have a separate recycling stream for PLA. He says the bottles can be recycled with normal plastics until Belu can encourage more recycling companies to separate biodegradable plastics from normal plastic.
Some brands of drink, such as Innocent and Ribena are now using recycled plastic for part or all of their bottles. But wide use of this material, known as PCR plastic, is not expected yet in the UK, according to Duncan Goose, founder of One water.
Is bottled water better for you?
Efforts to find greener options are commendable, but do we need to drink bottled water at all? Clive Johnson, a water expert at the Royal Society of Chemistry, is in no doubt.
“Tap water is as safe, if not more safe, than bottled water,” he says. “[It] is subject to more analyses and tests than both food and bottled water. It is also at least 1000 times cheaper to produce and requires less energy because it arrives at our taps with the help of gravity.”
But what about all the good minerals in bottled water? “All water has minerals,” says Johnson. “ Tap water has minerals and calcium too.”
Ethical brands
There is an extra twist in the bottled water debate. Young brands such as One, Frank, Belu, and Thirsty Planet, are all part of a growing trend of ethical bottled waters. These are produced by small companies in the UK who don’t distribute overseas.
Their main selling point is that they give money, in some cases all of their profits, to water projects in developing countries. These companies aim to help communities that would give anything to be able to turn on a tap and have a permanent supply of fresh water.