Wasting water

I'm a little puzzled by the latest fuss over bottled water. The arguments seem to be (and there are, as usual, three separate ones confusingly conflated) that

(a) it's wasteful to buy water in bottles when we have drinking-quality water coming out of the tap,
(b) some of the bottled water we buy in England has come an awfully long way in heavy bottles and has a considerable adverse impact on the environment (the BBC at one point claims that "producing and transporting a litre of bottled water can create up to six hundred times as much greenhouse gas as getting a litre of water from the tap", which latest example of balanced reporting of course tells us nothing about the environmental impact of the average bottle of water or the total impact of the industry) and
(c) it's ethically dubious to import water in bottles from countries whose populations don't have access to clean water themselves.

(C) seems like a given. I can find no-one reporting any meaningful data on (B), just the upper extreme of the range. It is (A) that puzzles me.

Approximately none of the water that comes into my house needs to be purified to drinking quality. Most of it is used for bathing. Some is used for flushing toilets and washing clothes. Much of it floats around my central heating going rusty. A little is used for washing dishes, a little more for teeth-cleaning. Some is drunk as tea, and therefore boiled first. And very occasionally I have a guest or two who wants to drink plain old water in preference to tea, fruit juice or Pinot Noir, in which case Tesco provides 2 litres of the stuff for 17p as part of its Value range.

I see the argument that it's a waste to provide both drinking-quality tap water and bottled water to the same house. What I'm less certain of is which of the two has the greatest environmental impact or creates the greatest waste. Purifying millions of gallons of water to drinking quality only to have most of it used for purposes that do not require drinking-quality water seems potentially more of a waste than a couple of billion pounds spent on what little water is used for drinking. It's an industrial era solution to a problem of drinking water availability that, happily, no longer exists. Maybe it's less wasteful to purify tap water only to the point at which it's fit for washing in (reasonably clean river water quality, say) and buy in bottles the relatively few litres we plan to drink.

Comments

[Rick]

What bothers me is that bottled water is not competing with the mains. At home, I drink tap water. It's when I'm out I buy bottled water - primarily because it is unseemly to knock on strangers' doors asking them for a glass of water as I make my way down Oxford Street.

Bottled water competes with soft drinks, not the mains. What are the comparable environmental and cultural affects of coca-cola, as comapared with water? Coca leaves and kola nuts come from Latin America and Africa - lots of air miles clocked up there, I should think, and I cannot imagine the Coca Cola company pays highly for them.

Refining cola is presumably a more energy consuming process than bottling water too. Mind, this doesn't even get on to the health impact. I don't think ministers should be discouraging us from drinking bottled water, when the next most common alternative is a dense, acid-based syrup drink.

[awrc]

Interesting proposal, though if one were being thorough presumably a study of how much contaminants in non-potably-purified water can still cause illness via washing, teeth-cleaning etc would need to ba factored in; 'reasonably clean river water' is a probably a myth in health terms.

And Rick raises a whole nother issue.

[Seamus McCauley]

AWRC - my guess is that there is a level of cleanliness at which water is adequate to wash in that is pretty cheap to produce, but that you couldn't clean your teeth in it so you'd have to use bottled for that. But yes, lots of work would need to be done to check it was safe.

Rick - I think people could reasonably carry a small bottle of water when out and about. Londoners do it in the summer as a matter of course for when the tube fails.

[Rosie Sherry]

But two wrongs don't make a right.

If you can make a difference by choosing not to buy bottled water, why not do it?

I wonder if better solutions exist, like water in cans (easier to recycle?) or in plastic bags (as done in South America).

It's a convenience thing, people are 'too busy' (or lazy) to care or think about it.

[Helen]

The best option would be to have proper systems in place to recycle water in the home - use old washing up water and bath water to flush the loo is a good example, and perhaps a system for using rain water for baths and showers.

As I understand it the main reason to avoid bottled water is the plastic bottles it comes in, which are obviously oil based and therefore a problem for co2 emissions.

[Ross Parker]

"As I understand it the main reason to avoid bottled water is the plastic bottles it comes in, which are obviously oil based and therefore a problem for co2 emissions."

Then your problem is not bottled water, but bottles, Helen. Why scapegoat water? Why not Dr Pepper?