If there is one product on the supermarket shelves that is sold on packaging alone, it is bottled water.
Identical in content and taste, the only real difference between competing brands is the marketing value of the label. You’d be hard pressed to differentiate between French, Belgian and British water in a blind taste test, but water brands are frequently sold on the basis of origin. Either that or the miraculous health-giving properties of some trace mineral or other.
It is a triumph of modern marketing that people in the United Kingdom, with universal access to cheap, clean water in the home, choose to consume an average of 37 litres of bottled water per person per year.
The bottle itself has become a symbol of self-preservation, accompanying us to the office, to the gym and to the bar. Unfortunately, a litre of bottled mineral water generates 600 times more carbon dioxide than a litre of tap water, and the polythene terephthalate bottles tend to sit around in landfills for a long time. Which is why Thames Water and Friends of the Earth have launched a campaign in the UK to rehabilitate tap water in restaurants and bars. After all, the stigma attached to ordering from the tap is an invention of the mineral water industry itself.
But the market for bottled water would be much smaller if local councils hadn’t ripped out the water fountains from the streets. I remember, as a boy, drinking from any number of free fountains on my local high street. I used to find them in the hallways of public buildings, and in the cloakrooms of restaurants. And when the time came to pass that water out the other end, there were plenty of public toilets to choose from.
Today, I must buy a bottle of water and, later on, plead with the manager of a coffee shop to let me use the toilet. I need to swallow my pride as I gulp from the cold-water tap of public wash basins. And I need an encyclopedic knowledge of benevolently minded stores just to avoid getting caught short.
Drinking water and going to the toilet are two of life’s most basic functions, but the civic infrastructure of the UK doesn’t appear to stretch to that kind of thing. It’s become the job of retail outlets and offices to perform these functions. Which is why we Britons spend £2-billion a year rehydrating ourselves with bottled water when we’re away from the taps at home.
It all adds up to a grim sort of anxiety — a begrudging acceptance that people will be charged, usually over the odds, for almost everything in life. Perhaps it’s overegging the pudding to suggest that disappearing amenities contribute to the breakdown of altruism, but the public takes its lead from the mean spirit of local government, which provides the most meagre of bare essentials.
Why, when the public is treated so cheaply, should it behave any better? Cities develop exclusively around the high street — coffee chains and shopping malls substitute for leisure centres and public amenities. Which is fine if you intend to spend your non-working life in shops.
The people who manage cities might be surprised at how civilising free water could be. People behave better towards one another when they’re treated less like consumers and more like citizens. – Â