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Oct 18, 2024

Time to revisit a ban on plastic water bottles?

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events A discarded plastic bottle of water washes up on the shore in Crosby, northwest England, on Earth Day 2024. David Olive is

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events

A discarded plastic bottle of water washes up on the shore in Crosby, northwest England, on Earth Day 2024.

David Olive is a Toronto-based business columnist for the Star.

In a recent poll commissioned by Environmental Defence Canada and conducted by Abacus Data, 84 per cent of respondents wanted to see less single-use plastic in grocery stores.

Poll respondents also called on business and government to go beyond the Canadian single-use plastic bans that came into effect last year, which don’t cover plastic bottles.

Yet Canadians are among the world’s heaviest drinkers of bottled water, about 97 per cent of which is sold in disposable plastic containers.

At $17.1 billion in annual spending on bottled water, Canada trails only the more populous U.S. ($87.7 billion), China ($67.7 billion) and Indonesia ($30.1 billion).

And on a per-capita basis, Canada ranks third in bottled-water consumption of the 109 countries studied by the UN’s University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UIWEH), a branch of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

In at least one way, bottled water is among humanity’s better inventions.

Its portability encourages water consumption at a time when doctors say most North Americans are dehydrated.

But the $400-billion global bottled-water industry is among the least environmentally sustainable of businesses.

The industry consists of packaging water in plastic bottles made from fossil fuels. And, in the case of imported water, transporting it by greenhouse-gas emitting ships and trucks to markets far from the water’s source.

In Ontario, only about half of plastic bottles are recycled. The rest end up in landfills or as “unregulated waste,” cluttering city streets, ravines, and local rivers and lakes.

A great many chemicals are used in the manufacture of plastic. An estimated 150 chemicals could be leaching from the roughly 600 billion plastic bottles and containers that are discarded worldwide each year.

The global bottled-water industry is projected to double its revenues by 2030, to about $700 billion.

That augurs poorly for a Great Lakes ecosystem that Environmental Defence says is already a dumping ground for about 10,000 tonnes of plastic waste each year.

Generations of older Canadians who relied on free, high-quality tap water might wonder how we got to the current ubiquity of commercial bottled water.

In the last few decades of the 20th century, the Perrier and Evian brands created a global market for premium bottled water.

Perrier is now owned by Nestlé, which also sells the San Pellegrino water brand. The Evian and Volvic bottled-water brands are owned by French food conglomerate Danone S.A.

The bottled-water market expanded as increasingly health-conscious consumers newly distrustful of tap water embraced Pepsi’s Aquafina bottled water and Coca-Cola’s Dasani brand.

Those brands were aggressively promoted by the soft-drink companies. They needed a new source of revenue to compensate for a decline in growth of consumption of their sugary beverages.

The notion of superior purity of bottled water is dubious.

The UIWEH reports on the numerous cases of organic, inorganic and microbiological contamination of hundreds of brands of bottled water as “strong evidence against the misleading perception that bottled water is an unquestionably safe drinking-water source.”

Last year, a French regulator, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety, found that Perrier’s sole source of bottled water, its springs in Vergèze, midway between Nîmes and Montpellier, were “chronically” contaminated with pesticides, fecal matter and so-called forever industrial chemicals that are practically indestructible and are toxic in even microscopic amounts.

Last month, Nestlé paid $3 million to settle a case alleging that it committed fraud by secretly filtering its water for years in violation of French laws requiring that the water be natural.

But filtering would appear to be necessary due to ever-increasing torrential rains in France, the world’s biggest exporter of bottled water.

The extraordinary rainfall, caused by climate change, is forcing contaminated shallow water into deep aquifers. France’s agricultural sector is among the world’s largest users of pesticides.

Nestlé’s response is a new brand, Maison Perrier, that can be filtered because it’s not marketed as natural mineral water. Nestlé has also spent about $225 million to upgrade its factory at Vergèze, determined, it vows, “to ensure perfect hygiene and food safety.”

The filtering methods include ultraviolet and activated charcoal purification. The filtering protects consumers but puts the lie to bottled water being naturally pure.

And it doesn’t address the problem of plastic-bottle pollution, regarded by governments and environmentalists as a crisis.

Many North American cities and institutions have imposed bans on the sale of plastic-bottled water.

You can replace plastic containers, too.

There is now a wide variety of durable, stylish reusable containers on the market, usually made from stainless steel and thermally insulated for hot and cold drinks.

They include the Yeti Rambler ($50 at Amazon Canada), the Owala FreeSip ($38), Brita ($28) and the Stanley IceFlow ($46).

Investing in a reusable drink container and making more use of tap water will put you in the vanguard of those helping protect the planet.

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

David Olive is a Toronto-based business columnist for theStar.

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