Bottled water: Pouring money away

[TheBear]

I spotted this article in the Irish Times, and thought it interesting. While it's part of the PriceWatch series, it raises a number of environmental questions.

• What's the story with bottled water?
  
  We like to complain about rip-offs in this country, but sometimes we only have ourselves to blame. Last year, Irish consumers spent hundreds of millions of euro on 135 million bottles of water while everywhere, outside a handful of blackspots, good quality drinking water flowed freely from taps.
  
  The average price of a litre of bottled water in Ireland is around €1.50 - and it sells for several times that amount in many restaurants and cinema foyers. It is not just financial cost but bottled water's environmental impact that is making a growing number of people uneasy, as the BBC's Panorama programme showed last week when it put Britain's love affair with the bottle under its microscope.
  
  Worldwide, consumers spent more than €30 billion on bottled water last year, while 2.5 million tonnes of plastic bottles ended up in landfills or as litter. In the US, 30 million water bottles are dumped in landfills every day.
  
  The production of a litre of bottled water emits hundreds of times more greenhouse gases than a litre of tap water. According to the Earth Policy Institute, around 2.7 million tonnes of plastic are used for bottles each year and making all the bottles for the US market takes 17 million barrels of oil - enough fuel to keep half of Ireland's two million cars motoring for a year.
  
  The most sobering statistic comes from the World Health Organisation, which has reported that at least 1.6 million people die each year from drinking contaminated water: 90 per cent of these are children under five. Significantly more is spent in the developed world on bottled water every year than would be needed to eradicate the deaths of all those children infected with fatal waterborne illness.
  
  Is it any wonder that on Panorama , British environment minister Phil Woolas said it was "morally 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 facing the world is the supply of water. There are many countries who haven't got pure tap water. We should be concentrating our efforts on putting that right".

I would be an occassional purchaser of bottled water, but I tend to reuse the bottles to bring tap water around with me. I hadn't really considered the environmental costs of it, though the financial absurdity is something I'm aware of.

Apart from the problem of contaminated water in some areas of the country, can any posters give a good reason for the amount we spend on bottled water in Ireland?

[905]

Sorry, you actually want good reasons for spending money on bottled water? Good luck.

(My 900th post and it's completely pointless )

[pauriceenjack]

We dont provide enough public drinking fonts, streets, schools, shoping centers, parks, etc

[Pidge]

A friend of mine was in France, and noticed that you could buy Irish water there.

So, you've got a situation where two countries, each with perfectly good drinking water, are shipping drinking water between each other. Ships passing each other, each laden with drinking water. Madness.

As for the bottles themselves, the German system is great. The bottles aren't recycled, they're reused. You make high quality plastic bottles, and slap a (for example) 50c deposit tax on each one. When the customer returns the bottle to the shop, they get their 50c back and the bottle is sent to a centre where it is washed and reused. Great stuff. Most shops would have space for this system, considering that the newspaper return policy has radically changed over the past few months.

[Pidge]

(My 900th post and it's completely pointless )

Soon you'll get to 905...

[Auditor #9]

I might buy 4, 1.5 litre bottles per month at ALDI and in the light of this above I wonder should I just get a water filter for my tap? My tap water is clean-tasting enough but I'm concerned about flouride, probably unconsciously. Can you taste flouride? I think I taste something from our tap water. I lived in different parts of the country and I've never found the tap-water great though it is good enough (some places have swimming-pool flavoured water in Cork and Dublin).

I think I started buying it carbonated because it dealt with a hangover better and is the lesser of two evils between soft drinks and water. That I don't have hangovers anymore means I should give up the water too now so..?

The fact that I'm drinking CO2 out of the environment doesn't offset the millions of tons of plastic not to mention the barrels of oil discarded I suppose ...

EDIT
Pidge is referring to 'Pfand' - a great idea indeed as the same bottles get used over and over and over. Try to find the most rotten bottle in the shop competition!

[AXL ROSE]

I have no shame in admitting that i only drink bottled water. My empty bottles go into my green bin not landfill. A lot of bottled water is ************************e. Ballygowan stinks of chlorine as does Kerry. I think that they both have above 24 mg of Chlorides per litre. Tipperary is a bit better with 13 mg. Value for money wise Centra still water is excellent, low chloride level and 99 cent for two litres. However nothing comes close to Evian. 4 mg of chloride per litre!

As I've said on this site before, you wouldn't eat a burger if it stank of chlorine.

If there was an Irish bottled water that came to the same high standards as evian I would gladly drink it as the air miles issue is a concern but until then I wont compromise. We are 75% water. We should take our drinking water seriously.

[CookieMonster]

I used to be a hoor for the bottled water. I'd buy at least one, sometimes two, 1l bottles a day. If I'd access to a water fountain then it would have been considerably less than that, replace day with week even.

Then I made some hippy environmental changes. I stopped buying bottled water, even for the bottle and got one of these re-usable bottles instead http://www.sigg.ch/ and also got a water fountain in college. I'd say the canteen (local peddlers of bottled water to dependent captive masses of college students) profits were halved because of it. I've lost my bottle numerous times and replaced it since but it's never leaked, cracked or burst on me. I would thoroughly recommend one. They come in funky colours too, if you like that sort of thing.

[Pidge]

If there was an Irish bottled water that came to the same high standards as evian I would gladly drink it as the air miles issue is a concern but until then I wont compromise.

So you refuse to cut your emissions unless it involves no sacrifices whatsoever? (And I think I'm being generous calling forsaking a particular brand of French bottled water a "sacrifice".)

My empty bottles go into my green bin not landfill.

Congratulations. Your waste is just, marginally less wasteful. :P

[johnfás]

I must say I am a proud tap water drinker. I probably buy a bottle of water about every few months, purely as a vessel which I reuse through tap water filling until I think it is time for it to be replaced, it then goes in the green bin.

That said, I do have the benefit of good quality tap water.