Bottled water… a scam or a real threat?

With a global market value of over $150 billion, it is the world’s best-selling soft drink, with a staggering 1 million bottles produced per minute, worldwide. So why has something that is no better than the liquid which comes out of our taps, but can cost 300-1000 times more, become so popular and what are the effects of this on our planet and society?

Tap water in developed countries such as the UK is cheap with the average daily use of 150 litres costing around 21 pence, and regulated to make sure it is of the requisite quality. So why would anyone choose to pay a premium for a small amount of bottled water? The answer lies in how it has been marketed. Companies promote the idea that their product tastes better than tap water, even though blind taste tests have often shown there is no difference. A quick google search shows there is an abundance of different products, with varying claims about what their water can offer (even going as far as claiming to be ‘Earth’s Finest Water’). In reality, they may have differing mineral contents but the differences in taste would be subtle. Between 25-30% of bottled water products are actually just standard municipal water that has been treated, reminiscent of a certain Only Fool's and Horses episode...

Its popularity may also be in part due to a recent push towards healthier lifestyles as people replace sugary soft drinks such as Coca-Cola with bottled water. This is positive in that it cuts the amount of calories in people’s diets (an estimated 74 a day on average in the USA) which has obvious health benefits, but the point remains that the sugary drinks could be replaced with tap water, rather than bottled water. Many of the purchases may also be based upon buying the actual bottle, rather than the water itself, as convenience and cost were shown to be two of the primary factors in decision making when buying bottled water (Ward et al., 2009).

There are negative environmental effects stemming from the bottled water industry too. The single-use bottles which are a regular component of many people’s lunch are made of the plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which requires a large amount of oil to produce. This of course produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, with 6kg of CO2 released for every 1kg of plastic (enough for around 50 water bottles) made as well as the extra released during everything from transportation to chilling the water for consumption. In contrast, Thames water estimate that to produce a litre of their water 0.0003kg of CO2 is released. Water is also used in the production process of bottled water, with estimates of up to 3 litres of water used to produce 1 litre of bottled water. On top of this, only about 25% of plastics are recycled with the remainder entering landfill (taking hundreds of years to decompose), being incinerated (producing yet more CO2) or ending up littering the world’s oceans posing a hazard to many marine life forms. The Great Pacific garbage patch - a gyre of marine debris that comes from both North America and Asia and consists of mostly plastics – has been estimated to be twice the size of Texas, and will only keep growing as more and more plastic bottles are used and thrown away.

Source: Marine Debris

A recent study by Jamieson et al., 2017 also highlighted the dangers of microplastics, which includes the plastics manufactured to be tiny and that are included in various cosmetic products, and those that result from degradation of larger pieces of plastic. These microplastics have been shown to infiltrate even the deepest parts of the ocean, with levels of 'persistent organic pollutants' in some amphipods in the Mariana Trench exceeding levels commonly found in highly polluted industrial areas.

As discussed in previous posts, around 10% of the world’s population does not have access to clean drinking water. One of the UN’s sustainable development goals was to ensure everyone has access to clean and safe water source by 2030, and surely some of the amount unnecessarily spent on bottled water annually would go a long way towards delivering this.

Filling reusable bottles with tap water would be an obvious step forward in reducing the purchasing that we see today. The recent 5p charge on plastic carrier bags in England has seen reductions in use of around 70% and there are also schemes in other EU countries to reduce waste such as a deposit being placed upon bottles meaning they can be returned to the producer and refilled. Similar arrangements could go a long way to reducing plastic bottle use in the UK, as well as other developed nations.