Environmental attack on bottled water does little to halt sales

The BBC's Panaroma programme recently claimed that a litre bottle of mineral water produces 600 times more carbon emissions than a litre of tap water.

Despite this, sales just keep on growing. Zenith predicts that based on current growth levels, global consumption of bottled water will rise to 251 billion litres by 2011 from 187 billion litres currently. That means bottled water sales are set to outgrow the once dominant carbonated beverage segment within two years even though the latter also remains buoyant in the face of environmental criticism.

“Economic obstacles and climate fluctuations will, of course, present numerous challenges, but the outlook for global soft drinks is as strong today as it has ever been,” concluded the Zenith report.

This does not mean that environmentalists are likely to stop trying to get people to switch to tap water. In America an `I Love Tap Water' campaign is being waged across university campuses and San Franciso's mayor Gavin Newsom last year announced a city department ban on using money to buy bottled water, while New York officials are urging consumption of tap water to cut down on the cities high levels of packaging waste.

In the UK, Friends of the Earth is set to embark on a campaign in conjunction with supplier Thames Water to push for greater availability of tap water in restaurants and bars. Environment minister Philip Woolas made his position clear when he spoke on Panorama.

"It borders on being morally unacceptable to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on bottled water when we have pure drinking water, and at the same time one of the crises that is facing the world is the supply of water," Woolas said on the 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."

But spokespeople for the bottled water industry claim that bottled water is stealing market share from other soft drinks (which have their own environmental and health issues) rather than replacing tap water. They also claim that the environmental impact of bottled water has been overblown.

“Bottled water currently accounts for just 0.03% of total UK carbon emissions and the industry is committed to cutting its carbon footprint further, through recycled packaging and innovations in extraction, energy efficiencies and transport,” according to statement by the Bottled Water Information Office. “It has already made a significant reduction in the weight of PET bottles - they now weigh 30% less than they did 15 years ago.”

Given that the average Briton drinks 37.6 litres of bottled water each year the environmental campaigners have their work cut out, and there seems little evidence that their message is getting through just yet.