UK not so thirsty for bottled water
The UK’s thirst for bottled water appears to be drying up.
New figures show that sales are falling for the first time in years.
Shop sales of bottled water fell by 9 per cent to £284m in the year to March, according to independent retail analysts. Also, water cooler sales have also fallen, although not as dramatically.
environmental costs
Green groups said they hoped the figures suggested the public was turning away from bottled water because of the environmental costs of packaging and transportation. Some of it travels to the UK from the Fijian islands in the Pacific!
Production of a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.
Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, welcomed the reduction in sales. He said: ‘Switching to tap water and refilling a reusable bottle is an easy way for all of us to cut plastic and glass waste and reduce the size of our carbon footprints.’
There is also the small matter of pollution. UK beaches are now more strewn with litter than ever, with plastic bottles having increased by 67% - see ‘UK beaches polluted’.
morally unacceptable
Phil Woolas, the environment minister, said that the amount of money spent on mineral water “borders on being morally unacceptable”.
“We have to make people think that it’s unfashionable just as we have with smoking. We need a similar campaign to convince people that this is wrong,” said Tim Lang, the Government’s natural resources commissioner. [More]
Fanta-stic profits
Two years ago, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.
The profit margin was fantastic: a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre means a margin of 9500%.
At some motorway garages you can pay £1.40 for a half litre bottle. This is £2.80 a litre. 1 Gallon is 3.785 litres, so £2.80 times 3.785 = £10.598 a gallon. ALMOST EXACTLY TEN TIMES AS EXPENSIVE AS PETROL!
As it happened, the entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.
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