Why are we guzzling water from a bottle

Water is essential to life, yet we face a growing global water shortage crisis as a result of severe mismanagement in water and sanitation, which will be exponentially exacerbated in the coming decades by population growth combined with declining resources.

New Zealand in contrast to much of the world has an abundance of fresh, clean drinking water, fresh from the tap. A small New Zealand town is particularly blessed – Putaruru is home to ‘Blue Spring’, Te Waihou, the source of about 60 percent of New Zealand’s bottled water. It has been reported that bottlers pay 75c a cubic metre. The cost to the consumer is about $3000 a cubic metre or $3 a litre.

Perhaps the real problem with bottled water is that it’s creating a mindset that water has a commercial price rather than being a universal human right. It begs the question, if we could prevent people getting access to everyday oxygen, would it be bottled and sold only to those who could afford it? Don’t laugh, it could happen.

In many Third World countries, the bottled water industry reduces the perceived need for governments to provide good quality water for the population. Millions of people around the world lack access to clean drinking water, and the World Health Organisation has estimated that 80 percent of all health issues in the world are due to waterborne problems.

Question: where we have an abundance of clean tap water, why are we putting it into a bottle when the only benefit is a profit to the bottler? And shouldn’t we be promoting worldwide access to quality water through a public tap, rather than creating an unaffordable method which will increasingly be out of reach to poorer people and those who can’t get easy access to it?