Tap Campaign Founder Joshua Blackburn on Bottled Water

As chief instigator of the Tap campaign, Provokateur’s Joshua Blackburn has been asked by ooffoo.com to have an online debate with a spokesman / spin doctor / pr lackey at the British Soft Drinks Association. He just kicked it off with the following article:
>> Is Tap Water Preferable to Bottled Water

Tap with Drip
Despite being the founder of the Tap campaign, whose mission is to take on the bottled water industry and get people turning on their taps, I secretly admire those in the water businessmission over the weekend. Em kept her eye on the woman in front of her who was shaking and staggering across the sidewalk. At a distance, the woman almost looked as if she were listening to some experimental music, her erratic movements accompanied by unheard notes, brilliantly interpreting the difficult tonalities. But as Em got closer, the absence of headphones and the glazed eyes shattered the illusion. The woman staggered and shuddered and muttered, squatting and straightening, drifting across Em’s path. Em did her best to miss the addict as she passed, and the woman nearly stumbled into her even so. This close, the burnt metal smell was nearly over-powering the other common Mission smells: wine, vomit, phlegm and feces. Forget selling ice cubes to eskimoes, they’ve gone one better: through inspired marketing, they’ve persuaded millions of people to fear tap water and believe healthy hydration is only available from mountain springs and Hawaiian aquifers.

So before bombarding you with facts and figures, I want to set out three truisms which I ask you to bear in mind as you consider this debate.

Firstly, bottled water is a business within which genuine sustainability is inescapably at odds with the corporate objective of selling. In a truly sustainable world, bottled water would not exist, but no industry person could ever wish for this, because they sell disposability – irrespective of its offsets and recycled bottles. Whatever the greenwash, be under no illusion: protecting the planet and selling bottled water are mutually exclusive affairs. This is an industry that consumes immense resources, generates mountains of unrecycled rubbish and contributes generously to Co2 emissions. It is, quite simply, a climate disaster.

Secondly, the real marketing strategy of bottled water is not health and wellbeing but fear. One job of bodies like the British Soft Drinks Association is to undermine public confidence in tap water, so expect lots of this from their spinner and recognise it for what it is – negative propaganda designed to instil fear and sell product.

Thirdly, tap water is good – hell, it’s actually a miracle! Because I don’t have a vested interest, I can admit it’s not always perfect and in some places it can taste funny. But what an incredible privilege we in the West enjoy in having safe, clean, fresh municipal water so freely available. (Ironically, the bottled water industry knows this better than most, since one quarter of bottled water sold worldwide is actually filtered tap water!)

Bottled water is, in fact, the triumph of marketing over common sense. Despite being 250 times cheaper than bottled water, and although most tap water tastes very good (in Decanter Magazine’s blind tasting of 24 bottled water brands, Thames Water came joint 3rd!), we’ve become obsessed that purity can only be found in bottles. But the truth is we aren’t buying water but brands, and when you take the brand away, the overwhelming majority simply can’t tell the difference.

British consumers spend billions on bottled water each year and worldwide the industry uses around 27 million tonnes plastic. We ship our water from Fiji, France and New Zealand (and I’m afraid even the stuff from the British Isles racks up ample travel miles). Meanwhile, tap water generates no rubbish, costs us next to nothing and is tested rigorously and regularly (in 2006 the Drinking Water Inspectorate gave 99.96% of tap samples a clean bill of health). I mean really, where’s the debate?!

Across the country, tap water is of incredibly high quality – but I want it even better so that no one can say of their water that it ‘tastes funny’ or they’re worried it isn’t clean. For those who need reassurance, Tap would heartily encourage every home, office and restaurant to install top notch filtration units so we never have to buy a bottle again. Not only would it pay for itself in a year, but it’d end, once and for all, the colossal consumer scam that is bottled water. In a world beset by environmental and financial crises, we need more things that are sustainable, cheap and healthy – for once, it’s literally on tap.

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