Message in a (plastic) bottle
15 August 2008
We all know that drinking 8-10 glasses of water a day will improve our prospect of long term health, but have you ever stopped to think where your 8-10 glasses come from? I'm talking about bottled mineral water, and we Britons consume 2.27 billion litres of it every year. Yet the trend for this type of water appears to be at an apex. Research, surveys and a little common sense are making it crystal clear that we are being conned into paying up 150 times more money for H2O out of a bottle compared with the equally good stuff that comes out of a tap.
A quick look at the many bottled water companies in the UK demonstrates that the foundation of their corporate image is based around words such as 'natural', 'fresh', 'pure' and 'taste'. This weak advertising ploy has been crushed by scientific research that proves the chemistry of bottled mineral water, when pitched against the good old tap, has no significant added health benefits. What's more, consumer surveys show that few of us can even tell the difference between bottled and tap water let alone between the array of individual brands. In effect they are competing to try and sell us fresh air which come to think of it, would probably be more useful in our age of global warming pollutants.
There are some utterly mind-boggling figures relating to our consumption of bottled water, mainly pointing towards the progressively devastating amount of plastic waste that is produced from consuming it. It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water to produce one litre of average mineral water. The impact of this wasteful system has only recently been fully realised in the world's oceans where it gets trapped in circular currents called gyres, where millions of plastic items (mostly bottles) literally carpet the surface for miles. It's truly astonishing.
This December British explorer and founder of 'Adventure Ecology', David de Rothschild will sail 8000 miles in a boat made entirely from plastic bottles to raise awareness regarding the huge plastic waste problem in our oceans. His journey will take him directly through the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' one of the five gyres trapping plastic rubbish in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere.
On a more local note, one of the easiest tricks to becoming an eco-friendly water consumer is to hold on to those empty plastic water bottles, refill them with tap water to be stored in your fridge. After all, bottles are going to be hanging around our planet for another 500 years so in terms of reusing they are quite handy. Get into the habit and then, whenever you need to quench your thirst, you'll have instant chilled water, bottled in your own home!
The UK has one of the safest water supplies in the world so why waste money when we can drink our fill at the turn of a tap?