Rochdale Euro-MP says glug from a jug!

Date published: 17/09/2007

Rochdale Euro-MP Chris Davies is encouraging local residents to reach for the tap and not the bottle when they need to quench their thirst.

In Britain around £1.7 billion is spent on bottled water each year and in the past year over 2 billion litres were consumed.  This is almost 15 times the amount drunk in 1988 and is set to grow by almost 10% per year as more consumers are choosing healthy alternatives to sugary drinks.

But Mr Davies is urging people to think twice before hitting the bottle.  He has launched his campaign to cut the use of bottled water by calling on the European Parliament to provide jugs of water instead of the thousands of bottles used at meetings. 

The Liberal Democrat MEP has written to the Parliament's president calling for the changes to be put in place. 

He said:  "It is crazy to waste valuable resources and pollute the environment by transporting bottled water for hundreds of miles when we can simply turn on the tap."

Most people believe bottled water is safer and tastes better than tap water. But The Drinking Water Inspectorate says water quality is at an all time high.  European law requires tap water to meet stringent quality standards and in the North West United Utilities carries out 360,000 separate tests on drinking water each year. 

Mr Davies commented: "Tap water is so pure that some bottled water companies actually use it as their source.  Customers end up paying for nothing more than fancy marketing!"

The main environmental impacts of bottled water are associated with its packaging and transport.  The consumer Council for Water says tap water does far less damage to the environment and is at least 500 times cheaper than bottled water.

Environmental charity Friends of the Earth estimate that globally around 1.5 million tonnes of plastic is used each year by the bottled water industry. Most of this will not be recycled and instead discarded bottles fill up landfill sites taking hundreds of years to decompose.

Tap water in the North West costs less than a tenth of a penny per litre. This is much cheaper than even the plainest table waters costing 300 times as much and many premium brands are 1500 times as expensive.

In the UK about a third of the bottled water sold is imported, mainly from France and Switzerland. A bottle of 'Evian' water travels on average 750 miles to get to the North West.