Dear Friends,

It's ironic, isn't it, that we are well into a water-shortage that has given us a hose-pipe ban and threatens to give us a drought order, and it keeps on raining ?  It's not that we are really short of water, just that we can't seem to share it out properly (and we spill such a lot in the process).  We are incredibly wasteful.

And yet we seem to be prepared to pay for it.  We don't have a lot of choice (when it comes to paying our water bills), but the most expensive water that we buy we do have a choice about - and still we buy it.  I refer to our appetite for bottled water.

Personally, I have never really acquired a taste for water - otherwise I would probably be out there buying bottles too.  I do have a sense of the ridiculous, though - and it has to be ridiculous to spend money on bottled water when it comes free out of the tap (and we are spending more on some brands than we pay for petrol…).

But it's purer, I hear you say.  Not true.  In Europe and the US the regulations governing the quality of tap water are more stringent than those for bottled, and some 40% of bottled water begins as tap water anyway - often the only difference being added minerals that have no marked health benefit, and that in large quantities can be bad for us.  The French Senate actually advises people who drink bottled water to change brands frequently, as the added minerals may be dangerous in high doses !  In Britain, dentists worry that children who drink bottled water may miss out on the fluoride they need to protect their teeth from dental decay.

But all that pales into insignificance beside the real problem with bottled water: the industry consumes vast quantities of energy and produces vast amounts of waste.  Bottled water is transported over great distances at great expense, and 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle it every year.

Then about 86% of the bottles are thrown away.  When incinerated, they produce toxic by-products; when land-filled, these will take 450 years to biodegrade.  And many bottles that are `recycled` are actually exported to China for reprocessing, adding yet more to pollution and transport costs.

The whole thing is a veritable triumph of marketing over common sense - all started by Perrier in the seventies.  So we can import vast quantities of French water (at ridiculous expense), but we can't contain enough of our own in pipes to prevent a hose-pipe ban.

In the same way, we run after so many fads and fancies - spending far more than we need for things we don't really want.  A mere fraction of what the world spends on bottled water would ensure that everyone on earth had access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation, but we can't manage that either.  I wish I could say that I would give it up, but I never really started drinking it in the first place - how about you ?