BOTTLED INSANITY

It’s the greatest consumer con of all — a mass addiction to drinking ‘healthy’ water from plastic that is destroying our planet

MANKIND’S love affair with plastic bottles that are filled with water represents the pinnacle of human irrationality.

Despite rising awareness of the global environmental plastics disaster we have created, the trend for consuming vast amounts of an expensive product we don’t need (what’s wrong with tap water?) and then discarding the container is growing rapidly.

Last year in the UK we spent more than £3.1billion buying nearly 4,000million litres of the stuff. That’s 100 times more than we did in 1980.

It seems we can no longer venture out without clutching a bottle to protect ourselves against imminent dehydration. And experts predict we will be buying nearly 10 per cent more bottled water next year, and every year, for the foreseeable future.

Plague

All of this is despite a welter of warnings about the impact on the planet – and now on our health.

As the Mail revealed yesterday, new research has confirmed for the first time that our bodies are becoming ‘polluted’ with plastic.

We are eating, drinking and inhaling microplastic particles, some of which are derived from plastic bottles. So how and where did the madness begin – and why does it persist?

This modern plague had beguilingly innocent beginnings. The first documented example of a bottled nonalcoholic drink being sold was in Boston in the United States in the 1760s, when a company called Jackson’s Spa started selling mineral water for ‘therapeutic’ uses. Other companies followed suit and a market was born.

But the glass bottles used shared a problem: the metal caps imparted a foul taste to the content. In 1917, American inventor Webster Byron Baker made the first plastic bottle cap, by heating Celluloid and crimping it around the mouth of a bottle.

It was the start of the plastics revolution that really took off in 1941 when British chemists at the Calico Printers’ Association developed a form of plastic called polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Within 25 years, scientists working for the American chemical giant Du Pont had found a way of making PET strong enough to contain carbonated drinks without bursting. It was cheap, lighter than glass and virtually unbreakable.

In 1978, Coca-Cola introduced the two-litre PET plastic bottle, which rapidly became the standard bottle material for fizzy drinks in all sizes. But there was a product that was far cheaper to make than sugary pop, and thus infinitely more profitable – fizzy water.

The French spotted the potential and perfected the trick of selling H20 at hugely marked-up prices – by marketing it as a ‘natural’ miracle. In 1977, a £4million advertising campaign across America used Orson Welles to trumpet how ‘Deep below the plains of southern France, in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, Nature herself adds life to the icy waters of a single spring: Perrier’.

Suddenly, Perrier was the only drink to be seen sipping. Sales in the US increased from 2.5million bottles to more than 75million bottles by the end of the following year – followed by rising sales in Europe. Within five years these two agents of the environmental apocalypse – water and plastic bottles – were being combined, and the big brands jumped aboard. PepsiCo launched Aquafina in 1994, Coca-Cola’s Dasani emerged in 1999 and Nestlé’s Pure Life in 2002.

Craze

No matter that nearly a quarter of the bottled water being sold in America was filtered tap water, the marketing departments were in hyperdrive, creating a liquid gold rush. Any environmental worries were squashed underfoot. For example, in 2008, in a masterpiece of ‘greenwashing’, Nestle declared: ‘Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.’

It added: ‘Most water bottles avoid landfill sites and are recycled.’ Such claims were vigorously challenged by environmental groups, but to no effect.

Over the past two decades, bottled water has become the fastest-growing drinks market in the world. The global market was valued at £120billion in 2013 and is expected to reach £215billion by 2020.

Here in the UK we use about 38.5million plastic bottles every day, driven largely by the bottled water craze, although other fizzy drinks and juice in plastic containers are a factor, too. And rather than being recycled, more than 15million of these bottles are, each day, either incinerated, dumped in landfill or discarded on the land or seas where we know they can enter the human food chain via contamination of marine life.

It is ironic that a product initially marketed as a boost to health has, through its association with plastic, become a threat to health.

Even before the new findings by scientists at the Medical University of Vienna were published this week, the World Health Organisation had announced a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water.

Fear

This followed an analysis of some of the most popular bottled water brands which concluded more than 90 per cent contained potentially harmful microplastic particles. Yet still we buy the stuff, proof that the power of marketing can trump the concerns of world-renowned scientists.

According to Stephanie Cote, an environmental scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, bottled water is positioned as the ‘elixir of youth’, with which we can salve our instinctive fear of ageing and death.

In her study, published this year, she cites a 2013 Evian marketing campaign in which people are seen walking past a window and seeing themselves as babies in the reflection.

Peddlers of bottled water are also shameless in their use of shots of mountains and glacial lakes, implying a lack of pollution and ignoring the evidence of the harm their products wreak on people and the environment.

Other research has shown young people are influenced by advertising that associates bottled water with convenience, so convenient they ignore the alarming reality, such as research showing 90 per cent of teenagers have gender-bending chemicals from plastic in their bodies.

If ever there was a time to take stock, it’s now. But be in no doubt, there’s a long way to go before we kick this expensive, pointless and lethal habit.