UK - Water wars

..................At the same time I notice something weird is happening with bottled water. Around the world, folks are starting to ask if it's really such a good idea. In London, where the distance food travels from farm to fork is already an obsession, the Green Party asks diners to request tap water. Gordon Brown recently announced that his government would be phasing out bottled waters in all its departments. In the US the mayors of several cities have pledged to do the same. Suddenly, bottled water is big news. I watch as reporters, using statistics from academics and environmental groups, blast away at the bottled water industry. But, curiously, their focus isn't water, at first. It's oil. Specifically, the 17m barrels it takes each year to make water bottles for the US market alone. That's enough oil to fuel 1.3m cars for a year.

There's also the energy needed to fill the bottles or to move them to consumers. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute estimates that the total energy required for every bottle's production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil. Transporting bottled water in the UK is said to create 33,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. And then there's the water itself. Manufacturing and filling plastic water bottles consumes at least twice as much water as the bottle will ultimately contain..................