Bottle vs tap grudge match hots up

The Sunday Times
June 7, 2009

Sick of being accused of harming the environment, the bottled-water companies are fighting back with campaigns attacking tap water

Danny Fortson

Hildon is one of the poshest bottled waters. Captured at its source under the chalk hills of Hampshire, it isn’t sold in supermarkets, only at upmarket venues such as the Savoy, Royal Opera House and the House of Commons.
Yet last month Hildon lost its cool and took a 20-page trade magazine advertisement attacking tap water. On one page under the headline “Is it safe?” it wrote: “Cancer drugs found in tap water”, adding further down: “Is there anything else they are not telling us?”
Some thought is was over the top. Sue Pennison at the Drinking Water Inspectorate described the ad as “scare-mongering”. “If they have concerns, they should bring them to us,” she said.
Hildon’s outburst may have been extreme but it is not isolated – the bottled-water industry is under siege. Environmentalists have been saying for years that the £1.5 billion-a-year business is an eco-catastrophe, creating millions of tonnes of emissions and plastic to contain, transport and sell something that flows freely out of the tap. Phil Woolas, a former environment minister, has labelled it “immoral”.

Yet for decades sales rose, providing billions in revenue for the drinks industry. Now that has gone into reverse. At the end of March bottled-water sales in the UK were down 12% on the year, according to TNS Worldpanel, the research firm. Since 2006, sales have fallen more than 18%.
This has stirred the industry into action. Last autumn, Britain’s biggest water bottlers launched the clinical-sounding Natural Hydration Council (NHC). Backed by Highland Spring, Danone UK, Evian, Buxton and Nestlé among others – but not Hildon – the NHC was created to give a “dedicated voice to the bottled-water industry”, according to director Jeremy Clarke.
“There has been a lot of criticism and chatter that has been unchallenged. The debate is misguided, emotive, subjective and misses the point,” he said.
So how does he propose to rehabilitate an industry that is sliding? By “reshaping the debate”, he said.
When criticism first arose, companies lashed out at tap water. They pointed out that, unlike their pure water from natural sources, tap water is loaded with chlorine, fluoride and other chemicals to make it drinkable. There were mentions of septic tanks and the tap-water industry’s poor record on leakage. Indeed, it loses more water through leaky pipes in one day than the bottlers produce in a year.
But bottled water seems to have lost that battle. Sales have continued to fall. Part of it is economic. A litre of bottled water, about £1 or so, costs about 500 times more than water from the tap. That’s a hard sell in tough times.
So Clarke is attempting to pull off a heroic rebranding. Bottled water and tap water are, he said, entirely different. Instead of looking at its merits relative to tap water, bottled water should be compared with fizzy drinks and juices. “This is the comparator group. In that context bottled water is the greenest, healthiest drink on the shelf,” he said. “It’s wrong to compare bottled water with tap water.”
The NHC recently launched a nationwide ad campaign to spread the message. It portrays bottled water as everything from an aid to dental hygiene and antiobesity elixir to an aid to brain function – “Your brain is about 85% water, so it’s not surprising that it’s one of the parts of your body that’s most sensitive to dehydration,” said one ad.
Jane Griffin, former nutritionist to the British Olympic Association, has been drafted in to cajole us into more “natural hydration”.
Clarke needs to be careful when attacking sugary drinks. Nestlé and Danone, after all, make many of the sugary drinks the NHC blames for rising obesity and bad teeth.
Reed Paget at Belu Water, a nonprofit bottled-water group, said the industry was merely tinkering round the edges when what was necessary was a fundamental shake-up.
“It’s like the oil industry saying there is no climate change and hiring PR agencies to confuse the public. What we need is a concerted effort to invest in better practices.”
It is true that bottled water generates a fraction of the emissions that come from juices or fizzy drinks. A litre of bottled water leads to the creation of about 165g of greenhouse gases. That’s about a third of those created for a bottle of fizzy drinks and an eighth of those from juice. Yet compared with tap water, bottled water produces nearly 400 times more carbon dioxide per litre.
And of the 13 billion plastic bottles of all types sold in Britain last year, only about a third were recycled. This means that billions of new ones, made primarily from petroleum feedstocks, are made each year and then dumped in landfill sites or incinerated.
Clarke argues that there simply aren’t enough recycled bottles to provide for the bottled-water industry. “We would like to get to 100% recycling but there is just not the security of supply. It’s something we need to get better at,” he said.
Belu has come up with a compostable bottle derived from corn. Paget said that if the bottled-water industry was serious about going green it should follow suit. “They cost more, which is why they haven’t been introduced.”
Safety is another concern.
Hildon, in its ad in Caterer and Hotelkeeper, the hospitality industry’s trade magazine, highlighted a case last year in which Anglian Water imposed a “boil water notice” after 22 people fell ill in Northamptonshire due to traces in tap water of cryptosporidium, a parasite that can cause gastroenteritis.
Pennison at the Drinking Water Inspectorate said Britain’s water system was among the best in the world and that 99.96% of drinking water supplies met minimum standards. Most of the other 0.04% was down to aesthetics, she said, where a burst main might cause some discoloration. Nobody has died from drinking bad water in Britain in modern times, she said.
Ironically, one winner from the spat appears to be the fizzy-drinks industry. Supermarket sales of colas have risen 4.5% in the past year, according to TNS.
Clarke said: “With obesity at the levels they are, that can’t be good. Drinking water is a good thing and people are not doing enough of it.”
What is certain is that with so much money at stake, there is plenty more PR spin and mud-slinging to come. Hildon ended its ad by calling for an “open and fair discussion”. It declined several requests to comment.