Bottled water

When I was in University, I was in a student symphony orchestra. One thing we often did was go on tours to other cities, meaning that we found a student orchestra abroad. We’d visit them and have them visit us the next year. We did that with, among others, student orchestras from Barcelona, Hannover, and Oslo. When the Osloinians came over to visit us, one of them asked us if they could drink the water from the tap.

We found this a silly question. Of course they could. We weren’t Greece, were we now?

But their question wasn’t that strange. After all, when I go south, I also start buying bottled water as soon as I pass the border, since I “know very well” that I can’t drink the tap water there. And Groningen, where I lived then, is south of Oslo.

Only two bottles of water left in the fridge of our cottage in Italy, last month. We must buy more!

So during our last stay in Italy, we went to supermarkets often to keep a steady supply of water in our cottage fridge. This we did out of habit, and not because we actually looked into it. Tap water we only used to shower and cook. And when we stayed for a night in the Swiss Alps on our way home, we drank the water from the tap in our hotel, since we fully expected it to be safe.

Water safety is crucial so buying those Italian bottles felt like a no-brainer, but think of all the plastics, worldwide, created, distributed, consumed and then thrown away, just because tap water is unavailable or unsafe. I use toothpaste in pill form and shampoo in the form of a soap bar to cut back on plastic usage. Why even bother, though, if everybody outside North-Western Europe buys water in bottles? Bottles that themselves need litres of clean drinking water for their production?

Out of curiosity, just how much would be involved in making tap water drinkable world-wide?

Here’s an infographic by Statista on the popularity of bottled water:

A sample of countries showing how many respondents regularly buy bottled water

Looking at the graph above, apparently we weren’t the only ones buying our water from the supermarket in Italy. 70% of Italians between 18 and 64 years old do so regularly. Oddly, percentages in Germany and Sweden are quite high as well. Personally, barring special circumstances, I would never buy bottled water in the Netherlands, nor would I have any reason to. Tap water where I live is safer than bottled water. What is going on here?

Yale University does research into Environmental Performance Indexes (EPI) by country, and Vividmaps makes nice infographics based on those. Here’s one about the quality of drinking water from the tap:

The quality of drinking water per country

According to this data, the best tap water is found in the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and some others where I would expect it, but in Greece and Malta as well. Unexpectantly, Italy’s tap water is safer than Denmark’s. Not by much, but still. When comparing with the other graph above, whether people regularly buy bottled water, does not follow actual water quality.

The problem, in many European countries, seems not that the water isn’t safe to drink, it’s its reputation. If people keep telling each other tap water isn’t safe, they will keep buying water in plastic. What seems needed, is a tap water reputation campaign.

Whether that will be easier than actually improving tap water quality in a country, will no-doubt depend on the plastic water bottle lobby.