Lewis Smith, The Times 16 Feb 08;
Drinking bottled water is almost morally indefensible, a government minister has suggested in a scathing attack on the industry.
Phil Woolas, the Environment Minister, said it was daft that six million litres of bottled water were drunk every day in Britain when safe tap water was universally and cheaply available. His comments echoed concerns among environmentalists, who believe that the packaging, transportation and disposal of bottled water products creates unnecessarily high carbon-dioxide emissions.
But they provoked a furious response from the industry, which is worth £2 billion annually. Representatives demanded an immediate retraction of his remarks.
Mr Woolas has further riled the industry by giving his backing to a campaign to persuade the public to use the tap as their primary source of drinking water.
Next week Thames Water, supported by Friends of the Earth and Mr Woolas, will start a campaign to persuade restaurants, pubs and hotels to make tap water more easily available to customers. By persuading people to switch back to tap water the organisers of the initiative hope to reduce the impact on the environment by cutting out the carbon-dioxide emissions from transportation and manufacture of the bottles.
Bottled water has been calculated to have a carbon footprint more than several hundred times bigger than tap water for some brands. Many bottles are transported thousands of miles to get to Britain from countries including the United States and Fiji.
The minister was particularly concerned about water being imported to Britain because of the potential damage to supplies in other countries.
“It borders on morally being unacceptable to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on bottled water when we have pure drinking water, when at the same time one of the crises that is facing the world is the supply of water,” he told the BBC Panorama programme.
“There are many countries in the world who unfortunately haven’t got pure tap water. We should be concentrating our efforts on putting that right in my opinion.”
He received unexpected backing from Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment Secretary, who agreed that the industry and consumers had big moral questions to answer.
“I don’t think Phil Woolas is wrong,” he said. “Huge amounts are imported from other countries — some now ludicrously from the Far East. This is an ecological nightmare and it doesn’t make economic sense either. It certainly raises questions about the basis on which we have constructed our economic lives. By any rational standard it’s crazy to be importing water from countries far away when there’s perfectly good water in our taps.
“It looks like the epiphany of any unsustainable human activity. I think as consumers we should consider the impact we have on the environment. If they think about it they might change their behaviour.”
Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, said that the environmental impacts caused by the bottled-water industry were sufficiently worrying that the Government should introduce taxes to pay for damage to be put right. Taxes, either directly on the sales of each bottle or through mechanisms such as landfill tax, would put pressure on consumers to change their behaviour.
A Swedish study calculated that the environmental impact of bottled water was 90 to 1,000 times greater than tap water, and could be higher.
Jill Ardagh, director-general of the Bottled Water Information Office, led the industry’s angry response to the minister’s remarks. “Mr Woolas is clearly ill-informed about bottled water and the role it has to play in society, either in this country or other parts of the world,” she said.
She said that an estimated 20,000 jobs depended on the bottled water trade and demanded that he retract his comments.
