| Environmental concerns are finally starting to affect the way the multi-billion-euro mineral water giants do business. Sarah Wachter investigates  It started last summer in the US, and it’s catching on across the Atlantic. Bottled water is the latest product to come under intense scrutiny for its environmental impact, with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) increasingly poking holes in the bottled water companies’ health messages and launching campaigns centred on waste and transport issues.
Unsurprisingly, NGOs are aghast at some water brands shipping bottles thousands of kilometres and transporting empties further thousands to China for recycling. US-based environmental groups, including Corporate Accountability International and Food and Water Watch, have been coaxing consumers to curb their bottled water consumption, while the mayors of New York, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis have been voicing concerns over rising amounts of bottles in municipal landfills and talking up the quality of city water. In New York, the effort is underpinned by a marketing campaign; health department workers have been handing out bottles to be filled from the tap, and prestigious restaurants such as Chez Panisse simply no longer carry bottled water. Now this latest wave of green guilt is crashing onto European shores, and the most concerted effort is happening in the least likely place of all: France, where consumption of bottled water is more than 20 times greater than it was 50 years ago. During Paris Plage, an annual festival along the Seine in August, and during the city’s Techno Parade in September, representatives of local water producer Eau de Paris handed out 50,000 water carafes to the ravers and beachcombers. The bottles, specially created by Eau de Paris after a design competition two years ago, are aimed at making it chic to serve tap water at dinner parties. The carafe now graces the tables of 500 Paris restaurants and around 30,000 households. Moreover, Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë now serves only tap water at official events. The tap campaign has spread to the provinces, where a group of large water producers has launched an ad campaign with the endorsement of French mayors. The campaign has hired comic actor Michel Boujenah as its spokesman, and uses “thanks to water” as its slogan. It was designed to raise public awareness of the public water system. “Water has a cost and a value, and there is an economic and environmental advantage on water from the tap over water from a bottle,” explains Sabine Sablonniere, the campaign’s press officer. In the UK, efforts to urge consumers to drink more tap water began this year when Sustain, an NGO that promotes policies for improved health, published a report in January entitled “Have You Bottled It? How Drinking Tap Water can Help Save You and the Planet”. The report fingered government agencies for wasting taxpayers’ money on bottled water. Since then, the Treasury, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the UK Food Standards Agency and Liverpool City Council have stopped offering bottled water. “There is a real movement towards looking at bottled water and asking, ‘Is this the wisest use of resources like glass and plastic?’,” says Nick Ellins, head of consumer strategy for Water UK, which represents various water suppliers. In July, Green Party MP Jenny Jones launched a campaign asking Londoners to request tap water in pubs and restaurants. Now some UK restaurants are following suit. Italian chain Strada bottles tap water. Caffè Nero offers tap water in jugs. In September, even supersize-fixated McDonald’s said it would now offer tap water in all its UK restaurants. Meanwhile, sports bottles are being sold in London emblazoned with the slogan “I choose tap water”. A year ago Waste Watch, a UK NGO that promotes waste reduction, launched Turn on the Tap, a roadshow in four London boroughs that gave taste tests on bottled versus tap water to 650 Londoners and asked them afterwards to boycott bottled water. Researchers point out that as more mineral and spring water is consumed, public confidence and awareness of the public water system wanes – even though tap water is perfectly healthy to drink in developed countries and costs at least 100 times less than bottled water. At the same time, public water systems face increased costs as some regions become more drought-prone and as health authorities deal with increased costs for treating water laced with rising levels of pesticides from agricultural runoff. Some environmentalists point out that bottled water does not have to meet as exacting health standards as tap water. Bottled water sales are still healthy, running about 2% ahead of last year in Europe and around 6% up in the US, although volume sales figures are unusually high in the US due to aggressive discounting by Coca-Cola’s Dasani, Nestlé’s Poland Spring and Pepsi’s Aquafina. Sales slid around 2.6% in France last year, but that had more to do with competition from low-priced bottled water brands such as Cristaline, says Jean-Marie L’Home, an analyst with Aurel Leven in Paris. The weather can have a bigger impact on sales than current environmental campaigns, according to Patricia Fosselard, secretary general of the Brussels-based European Federation of Bottled Water (EFBW). Regarding the Turn on the Tap campaign, EFBW said in a statement: “We regard the two sectors as complementary.” Analysts say the recent trend of NGOs encouraging consumers to drink more tap water and less bottled water is too small to put a dent in the sales of well-established bottled water brands, but the bottled water industry is starting to pay attention. The International Bottled Water Association has teamed up with its US counterpart to convince consumers that bottled water is safe and healthy. The British Soft Drinks Association and bottled water companies this year launched the Bottled Water Information Office to do the same in the UK. The bottled water industry has been making incremental attempts for decades to reduce packaging, increase recycling, and find transport methods that consume less oil. Unlike in the US, European companies must meet obligations under the EU Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste to take back their packaging. These obligations have evolved into “green dot” schemes in 22 EU countries. In these schemes, a company makes a financial contribution to a national recovery organisation for its waste, which allows the company to affix a green dot logo to its packaging. Nonetheless, the amount of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) – the substance most commonly used for bottling beverages – generated in the EU makes up a large and growing share of post-consumer waste. PET waste rose 28% in just four years to around two million tonnes by 2005. The EU recycling rate of PET averages 35%, with wide disparities among member states, from 92% in Sweden to 16% in Hungary. The EU raises recycling targets every four to five years.  To increase the recycling rate of PET even further, the European bottled water industry is now backing a regulation for harmonising “bottle to bottle” recycling. EFBW expects the EU to approve the regulation by the end of the year. “Bottle-to-bottle applications are a vital part of making PET truly sustainable, and there is technology available to provide solutions for that,” an EFBW statement says.
Some EU bottled water companies are converting to transport methods that consume less oil. Whenever feasible, some companies move bottled water by barge instead of by truck. Danone, which ships by river in France to the seaport of Fos-Marseille, estimates that it now keeps 5,000 trucks off the road per year. Nestlé says that by shifting to rail transport for its Pellegrino brand on the route from Antwerp to the Vosges mountains, it reduced CO2 emissions by 80%. Nestlé transports Pellegrino by rail wherever possible in Switzerland, and this has reduced truck transport by a third, says Nestlé Waters spokeswoman Henriette Moureau. Some bottled water companies have made consistent efforts to make smaller, lighter bottles and reduce other packaging. A 1.5-litre Evian bottle got 15% lighter between 2000 and 2005. Nestlé says it has reduced the total amount of packaging for bottled water by a little more than a quarter between 2002 and 2006. Nestlé recently introduced the “feather bottle”, 30% lighter than the average half-litre container, in the US, and has also converted the Vittel bottle from its characteristic square shape to a rounded design in the interests of reducing packaging. New pallets allow Nestlé to stack more water per container, reducing CO2 emissions by 14%, according to Moureau. Despite ongoing efforts to display its green credentials, the bottled water industry might have some may to go; at a meeting at industry event World Water Week in Stockholm, Nestlé sponsored bottled water that it shipped from France instead of choosing a local brand. “This shows the complications and contradictions in the industry right now,” says Richard Holland, director of the Living Waters Campaign at the World Wildlife Fund. While analysts say the current tap water campaigns will have minimal impact on bottled water sales on either side of the Atlantic in the short run, the future could be very different. “We will probably see a major impact in the long term; maybe five years in the US,” says L’Home. “If the case is made in a persuasive fashion and a lot of NGOs get behind it, it is possible to change consumer behaviour,” says one European analyst on condition of anonymity. “It could really catch on. Look how all of a sudden all the political parties in the UK are talking about a one-off sales tax of £2,000 on large vehicles. Environmental consciousness does happen.” EB |