Paris has decided to take on one of the world’s silliest, most wasteful industries – bottled water.
This month it launched a campaign for people to drink tap water and to demand tap water at restaurants.
Paris city authorities think it is bizarre that they provide drinking water that is equal or better quality than bottled water, yet people are duped or lured into buying bottled water that costs between 250 and 3000 times as much per litre. They cite huge environmental costs of bottled water – the stuff has to be transported to retailers and the plastic bottles either end in landfill or go to costly recycling.
So they are taking on the bottled-water industry, using some of the industry’s own tactics – glamorous brand-name advertising. They have scrapped the name Sagep, which stands for Société Anonyme de Gestion des Eaux de Paris or Parisian Water Management Company Limited. In its place they have created the name Eau de Paris – sounds like a perfume.
Maybe the horribly acronymphomanic Actew should take note. Perhaps it should call its water Brindabella Blue or something similar.
The bottled-water industry is growing at around 10 per cent a year. Annual sales are at about $40 billion – about half the world foreign-aid contribution. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that 22 million tonnes of bottled water are transferred each year from country to country. Each year, 1.5 million tonnes of plastic are used, 90 per cent of which is not recycled.
It is quite bizarre. In the US about a quarter for bottled water is just tap water in a bottle. A further 15 per cent of bottled water is tap water with some minor filtering to get rid of the chlorine taste. The chlorine is needed in tap water because it is stored in bulk for indefinite periods before being piped on demand. But it is easy to get rid of the chlorine taste in tap water; just leave it to stand in the fridge for a few hours.
The National Resources Defence Council in the US did a study of bottled water, testing 1000 bottles from 103 sources. The water was nowhere near as pure as the advertisements suggested. About one third of the sources had the water from at least one bottle tested containing levels of chemical or bacterial contaminants exceeding those allowed under a state or industry standard or guideline. Nearly one in four sources had a bottle that violated California’s requirements, most commonly for arsenic or cancer-causing man-made organic compounds. Nearly one in five sources contained, in at least one sample, more bacteria than allowed under microbiological-purity guidelines.
That study is several years old and it was of US bottled water. Standards have improved. And in Australia there is a national voluntary code endorsed by the Australia New Zealand Food Authority. There has been no repeat of the Perrier water contamination of a decade ago.
But equally, contamination of public tap-water supplies are rare events indeed. Sydney’s cryptosporidium scare in the 1990s is one of those rare examples.
In general, the public water supply is more closely monitored to higher mandatory standards than the voluntary codes for bottled water. Actew, like all public water suppliers meets Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Guidelines and the National and International Quality System Standard ISO 9002 (1994). And it is tenting for quality constantly.
Tap water is equal to or better than bottled water. But advertising hype and the easy negative portrayal of tap water as being inferior seems to have taken in millions of people.
Oddly enough, the very people who are taken in by advertisements for water taken from idyllic mountain streams would be horrified if you actually took them to a mountain stream and said, “Kneel down and drink it.”
True, International Bottled Water Association guidelines (and their Australian counterparts) prevent members from trying to capitalize on fears over tap water, or from advertising that their products are purer than tap water. But the bottled water producers do not have to. Hoteliers, restaurants, resorts and retailers do the work for them. They are making a buck out of it. A simple sign at a resort saying: “Management does not recommend drinking tap water” is enough to ensure profitable sales of bottled water.
Maybe the human condition is such that fear and status are more powerful than logic and information. If that is the case, I suggest Actew should simply pour its tap water into bottles with a trendy label like “Brindabella Blue”, sell it to idiots elsewhere in Australia and use the proceeds on water purification in the ACT.
Actew produces drinkable water into the home at one tenth of a cent a litre – about 2000 times cheaper than bottled water. That leaves a lot of money for bottles, advertising and profit.
If you can’t stop the gravy you may as well join it.