Check out the shelves of your local supermarket or the bar of any restaurant and you’re likely to find water from all over the world. It might look and taste pure enough but the appeal ends there. For a start, bottled water is indistinguishable from tap water. In many cases, it is even derived from municipal tap water and filtered which is why PepsiCo agreed to add the words “public water source” to the label of Aquafina. Worse, shipping the stuff causes unnecessary environmental damage. Refrigeration wastes even more energy. And, of course, millions of plastic bottles end up in landfills. The regulations governing the quality of public water supplies are far stricter than those governing bottled-water plants. The industry responds that it is selling “portable hydration,” but filling a bottle from the tap works just as well. In fact, bottled water would appear to be the ultimate marketing success — what else can you get people to pay so much for that is already available to them at a low cost in their own homes? And so the idea persists that there is something magically superior about bottled water. However, a backlash against bottled water is gathering pace as people realize just how crazy it is. And irresponsible, given the wastefulness of it in every aspect, especially since more than a billion people on the planet lack access to it. But as fads shift so do elitist ideologies. Tap water snobbery is now emerging as born-again tap water aficionados argue it tastes better than many bottled offerings and state-of-the-art tap water filtration systems are emerging as new bragging points. Shifting tides? How appropriate that there is water involved.
