Thursday, May 15, 2008

Selling Ice to Eskimos

By: Angus MacDonald, Stakeholder Forum

Imagine packing up ice made in a freezer and shipping it to Greenland and Northern Canada for the locals to consume. This would be ridiculous, a complete waste of time and resources. But is there a difference between this unlikely scenario and the scenario that unfolds every day in cities like New York with perfectly safe tap water? Is selling bottled water in cities where tap water is healthy and plentiful akin to selling ice to Eskimos?

Why Water Matters

Water needs to be on the political agenda. It matters. It is what all life on Earth depends on. Out of all the water on Earth, 97% is salt water. The remaining 3% is freshwater, but of that about two thirds is locked up in glaciers or underground and difficult to access. It means human life depends on one hundredth of all the water on Earth for its needs. Walking a kind of aquatic tightrope, the ever increasing world population needs to use the fraction of potable water it does have within its reach more thriftily, equitably and sustainably.

1c per gallon

Yet bottled water seems an affront to the idea that we are using scarce resources sensibly. In New York City where we have gathered for this Commission for Sustainable Development, the tap water costs less than 1 cent per gallon to consume. Bottled water on the other hand works out at nearer $10 per gallon. Aside from the hit your wallet takes, the environmental cost of bottled water, the energy and oil used making the plastic bottles and transporting them from the source into the store, is huge. The total estimated energy required to make, transport and dispose of one bottle of water is the equivalent to filling the plastic bottle one quarter full of oil. With oil over $120 a gallon, can we really afford such a ludicrous waste of the black stuff, never mind the blue stuff?

Chronic Waste

Yet the Vienna Café, with its charming smoky air and laptop wielding delegates, is strewn with empty water bottles at the end of the day. I can see five bottles of water just from my table here, while a tap with drinking water lies just 20 yards away. What right do we have to talk about sustainable consumption when we purchase this quintessentially wasteful product?

It all adds up to an absurd waste of water. We should be saving precious water resources and cutting out our most wasteful consumption. Bottled water in countries where tap water is safe to drink must rank pretty high on that list.