PP10: Water wastage

Bottled water. When it was first introduced many thought it was a joke – why would anyone pay for something they have already paid for in their homes? Well, they clearly underestimated the power of marketing didn’t they? Bottled water now makes up 20% of the entire soft drinks industry in the UK and 50% in the rest of Europe.

European water is perfectly safe to drink, despite what many (typically older) people may tell you. The environmental impact of pumping fresh water from its source, manufacturing billions of plastic bottles, transporting them across the globe, distributing them across a nation and then after its five minutes of glory having the bottle dumped in a landfill - is disastrous, to say the least. The bottled water industry protests that it accounts for just 0.03% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. Even assuming that this isn’t a highly conservative figure, it still sounds to me as if this is a perfectly valid target. It is pure convenience that makes people wait in line to purchase the stuff from their local supermarket rather than spend 5 seconds filling up a bottle from their tap before they set out. Therefore I am afraid to say; that in my current eco-nazi mindset, that is one convenience we are just going to have to sacrifice.

So how could you regulate against 20% of the soft drinks industry? An outright ban would be the most effective and I honestly don’t feel it would be too drastic an action either. Yet to allow for the mirage of continued consumer choice, a high tax might be more appropriate. The new law would have to be written carefully to avoid manufacturers simply going out and adding ‘a hint of cucumber extract’, or something ridiculous, and claiming their product was a soft drink just like any other. To facilitate the death of bottled water the government should use some of the money raised to pay for drinking fountains in public spaces.

This should also come as part of a wider policy on global water security. Such a policy would ideally include tax incentives for the water purification and desalination industries (which might also go someway to offsetting the jobs lost by battering the bottled water industry). Again, the undemocratic axe wielded by Brussels should be sought to make this a European wide policy.