Parched City (24 page)

Peter Oborne, then a journalist for the
Evening Standard
, was in the City of London on December 6
^th
1989, when the Thames Water Authority was rebranded Thames Water PLC. His report described a very public scene, with thousands of would-be water investors queuing at the door of National Westminster Bank for the 10am investment deadline: apparently an outpouring not yet seen for the shift of national assets to the private sector. Oborne captured a very excited reaction from the Minister who seemed giddy by the endorsement of ‘“popular capitalism”’.
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Not long after this rush of excitement, Michael Howard soberly announced another limit from the state on the private enter-prises’ freedom, in the formation of a Drinking Water Inspectorate. This secondary state check on the freshly privatised water industry, alongside OFWAT, was clearly a structure designed to disperse the remaining cloud of doubt over whether the public should trust their tap water or not. From 1990, the Inspectorate was to ‘provide independent reassurance that water supplies in England and Wales are safe and drinking water quality is acceptable to customers’.
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Friends of the Earth reportedly remained sceptical about the new organisation, on the grounds that it was an auditor rather than an independent testing centre.
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Still, it certainly meant that Thames Water PLC’s department of water treatment and examination was under external scrutiny in tandem with its mandate to comply with European water quality standards, now inscribed in the law.

Pollution Prosecution

In spite of the enthusiastic scenes in the City of London endorsing tap water’s transfer to the corporate sector, bottled water’s marketeers continued to kindle memories of municipal water controversies and failures.
Cosmopolitan’s
1990 summer issue included a feature advertisement for Highland Spring.
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The advertisement’s opening line was frank about the company’s mission to plunder profits from tap water drifters: ‘Ever since the growing concern about British tap water, mineral water sales are booming, and one of the most popular in Britain today is Highland Spring.’ Readers were invited to send away for a free device for monitoring tap water problems in their area. Once the Drinking Water Inspectorate’s work was underway, in 1990, it was probably to the organisation’s great relief that drinking water fears that year switched focus temporarily to bottled water. When traces of benzene were found in Perrier, all of its British stocks were recalled.
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However, filters were also flooding the market by then. Brita was one prominent brand in the U.K.’s filter market. The product for ‘optimising tap water’ had been invented by a German entrepreneur in 1966, and named after his daughter.
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In 1990, Brita’s ‘two-litre deluxe’ jugs were on sale in Selfridges department store for £9.99. Plumbed-in filtering machines were also on sale at this store; fresh from American space programme models, for an eye-watering £240.
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There was certainly a solution to absorb every budget.

To counter tap water’s poor image, Thames Water PLC mounted a sustained public relations campaign in the early ‘90s to reassure consumers about its product. A
Drinking Water Quality
booklet the company published confronted the elephant in the room: ‘Water quality has been very much in the news lately. It’s good that people are becoming more aware of the importance of water quality, but the messages are confusing.’
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One reassurance it offered customers was that legal action had also been taken against other EU countries, such as neighbouring Ireland and France. Two leaflets the company issued in the early 1990s acknowledged that many customers feared the safety of their tap water. On the subject of filters, the company emphatically stated: ‘We do not consider that water filters are necessary on health grounds and do not endorse particular types or brands.’
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Customers who worried about nitrates were advised
that ‘only special resins’ could play any role in their removal. Bottled water’s share of the market was tackled in a
Water Quality Fact Sheet
. This leaflet argued that bottled water was not healthier than tap water on the grounds that the regulations governing its quality were not as stringent as for piped supplies, particularly on a bacteriological basis. Generously, the corporation issued some guidelines for those whose opinion could not be swayed against using bottled water, including the warning that it should never be used ‘as an alternative to boiling tap water for making up baby foods’.
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Thames Water’s marketing department proved that the game of casting doubt on drinking water safety could be as easily played in its own favour. One public relations tactic the corporation employed was the exposure of the shrouded sphere of the water examination laboratory, notably highlighting female staff. Had the communications department decided that highlighting women as the guardians of public water was a positive corporate image? Either that, or it was a true reflection of the laboratory of the 1990s.

Some of the tap water fears Thames Water was responding to may have been rekindled in 1991 when the former South-West Water Authority was fined the relatively minor sum of £10,000 for its liability in the Camelford aluminium pollution incident.
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Lead contamination also came back under scrutiny that year in the water industry when the Water Research Council was commissioned by the Government to carry out a feasibility study for the replacement of the entire nation’s lead-based plumbing, then recognised as the main cause of lead leaching into drinking water. This measure was taken on the grounds that a further European directive was likely to lower the permitted standard.
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Lead pipes were most likely to be service pipes, transmitting water from the mains to individual houses or indoor plumbing. Responsibility for the former lay with the water companies and for the latter with homeowners or landlords, including of course local authorities. Building constructed after the late 1970s were
unlikely to have any lead pipes. In 1992, the report concluded that both companies in England and Wales were faced with a £2,836 million bill for their liabilities whilst homeowners potentially faced a £3,101 million re-fit costs.
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It was another drinking water problem without an instant solution. Londoners could at least be smugly relieved that their homes were known to be less toxically plumbed than those in the north of England.

The deadliest blow yet to tap water’s public image came in 1992 when the long dispute over the United Kingdom’s alleged failures on adapting to the Drinking Water Directive, by 1985, came to a conclusion. The European Court of Justice ruled that drinking water standards had been breached because of excess nitrate levels prior to 1989 and that this problem had leached into the early 1990s.
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Thames Water was exempt from recent failures, but the Three Valleys Water Company serving part of London’s outer northern and north-western boroughs was included in the guilty companies list. Records of which specific areas of the Three Valleys supply were affected are extremely elusive in the published archival documents of the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Although the same map of nitrates breaches was reproduced in two newspapers, the detail of the affected areas in London was not spelled out. Whatever exposure London’s perimeter had experienced, it was minor in comparison to rural north Anglia.
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In this climate consumers faced a decision about whether to trust plain tap water, to invest in maintaining a filtered version of it, or to buy water in a safely sealed package from some rural paradise or another country. For the latter, the
Good Water Guide
folks happily obliged by updating their handy little volume in 1994. Readers could now be assured of a far greater choice of superior drinking waters, or so its authors believed, much closer to home.

Sticking with the Bottle

In the Guide’s introduction to the U.K.’s own brands, a paparazzi
shot of Lady Diana shows her clutching a litre of bottled water along with her tennis racket. Stunning claims were made about the market’s growth since the last edition: ‘In 1993, people in the U.K. drank 570 million litres…three times as much as they swallowed five years ago and 10 times more than they downed in 1983.’
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According to the authors’ market research guru, this was due to public distrust of tap water’s safety and Perrier’s successful advertising campaigns. The brand’s benzene episode, however, had created a gap for new British brands to fill and sixty homegrown ones were now available. The Guide chose thirty-three of the finest to profile, noting that still water in the nineties had displaced the ‘80s love of bubbles.
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Abbey Well was lauded in the top ten British mineral waters, with sales of 14 million litres per annum and described as a ‘clean tasting water’, ‘low in sodium, calcium, nitrate and other minerals’.
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Northumbrian in origin, it was apparently ‘especially popular in London and the south east of England’. Most significantly, the Guide commented on the ubiquity of bottled water’s presence in all retail sectors, the largest being supermarkets.
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Bottled water had become a mass-marketed convenience food.

The shift in public mood away from importing exotic European water was manipulated by Highland Spring, with a hefty dash of irony. A 1996 publicity campaign featured a French model, posing against the shabby chic façade of the Bistrot de Peintre in Paris: ‘The Scots can keep their haggis and shortbread. I’ll have their Highland Spring.’
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In a remarkably short space of time, Britain had upended the 1980 Water Research Centre’s profile of the nation’s drinking water habits which reported that ‘the majority of people do not consume mineral water’.
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Trying to keep pace with the drinking water zeitgeist, a 1995 update of that first survey found that bottled water consumption had risen dramatically and the diversity of brands was particularly noted. For those already in the habit of drinking bottled water, their consumption had risen by a third and the survey also found that
these drinkers were ‘most likely to be female, aged between 16 and 45, from the Midlands, Wales or the South, and part of a household in which the main wage earner is in a professional/managerial (AB), clerical (C1) or skilled manual (C2) social group’.
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Individual servings of drinking water were apt symbols of the growth of a global free market economy. Many of the failings that precipitated the demand in Britain for this highly profitable product are connected to Thatcher’s Government’s desire to wash its hands of the complex problems faced by Britain’s publicly owned water industry in the mid-‘80s. In his critical history of neo-liberalism, the Marxist geographer David Harvey interprets, more generally, Thatcher’s privatisation policy as a move to ‘rid the government of burdensome future obligations’.
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It is an unfortunate irony that Friends of the Earth also played a critical role in stoking the demand for bottled water and disposable filters during this period. There is no doubt that the third factor in the bottled water market’s steady growth was the success of its promotion through prolific advertising campaigns as a fashionable health accessory for stressful twentieth century lives, or even as a less healthy hydration accessory in the ecstasy-fuelled rave culture of the 1990s. Whoever chose to buy it, the stability of the bottled water fad was also tied to one function of the product: its portability. The bottle was a personal, mobile drinking fountain.

Perversely, or perhaps logically, mobile hydration took off just as the desiccation of public drinking fountains was complete. A rather plaintiff entry in the Drinking Fountain Association’s annual report of 1985 announced that a poster competition for young people was to be launched the following year with the primary aim of encouraging appreciation of public fountain heritage and a secondary hope that such an appreciation might combat acts of vandalism.
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As that decade progressed, the Association retreated indoors. It provided primary schools with
utilitarian fountains, which was a worrying shortcoming of provision for young people’s hydration that the charitable sector was stepping in to fill.
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Persistent references to ‘vandalism’ over a period of twenty years hints at the deeper waves of social unrest that was finding expression on London’s streets. For instance, 1981’s riots in Brixton unleashed the tension between young people and the police over one bloody and fiery spring weekend, and by that summer street violence spread to Dalston in the east, Southall in the west and Wood Green in the north.
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Slower burning scenes of public protest could also be seen on the civil service picket lines from March to July 1981.
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The decline of civic services that employed such workers was further helped along by Margaret Thatcher’s Government’s abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986. With the loss of a strategic Government for the capital, coherent plans for nascent urban services such as waste recycling were negatively affected. In 1988 the problem of street litter was pronounced to be a citywide disgrace.
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Disposed water bottles were one the mass-produced disposable products increasingly adding to the volume of consumables in London’s daily waste stream throughout the 1990s. By the Millennium, bottled water’s transition from novelty to normality was complete.

Chapter Nine

Tim Hayward’s exclamation was written in response to a tantrum he witnessed in a London museum, when a teenager howled at her mother for failing to buy her a bottled of water (amongst other crimes). The girl’s threat to swoon from dehydration prompted a blog from the food writer. In the teenager’s defence, maybe she was aware that her irritability was exacerbated by thirst. The odd drinking fountain has sprung up in London’s museums, but a free drinking water source is by no means guaranteed in any public building, except schools (as mentioned in the introduction, not compulsory) or in prisons.

In the Noughties, or 2000s, sightings of Londoners swigging bottled water on the Tube, at office desks or in local parks were commonplace, even banal. Some of the trendiest brands carried by teenagers as accessories masquerade as freshly bought bottles when they are in fact tap water refills. Re-using bought bottles is certainly not a practice confined to young people, but obviously someone has to purchase them in the first place. Finding bottled water is not a problem, anywhere. Corner shop fridges glisten with rows of them, usually with two to three brands to choose from. London’s cafés, from the most upmarket to greasy spoons are stocked to the gills with chilled water choices, whilst supermarkets invariably dedicate half an aisle, or even more, to bottled water options. Given that the latter comes unrefrigerated, those
bottles are most likely to be bound for use at home, or possibly by more frugal bottled water consumers (who presumably plan their extra-domestic drinking water needs). Those who stockpile their water might be relieved to read that the bottles’ contents will remain fresh for more than a year. Fresh? The Natural Hydration Council helps by reminding consumers to ‘drink plenty’ of (bottled) water on behalf of its member brands: Highland Spring, Spa, Vittel and Volvic amongst other corporations.
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Cooperation between these competing brands must be deemed a worthwhile exercise within the U.K.’s lucrative hydration market.

Between 1993 and 2003, the bottled water market swelled from 570 million litres per annum to a staggering figure of over two billion litres.
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Consumption did not dip below the two billion mark during the twenty-first century’s first decade. That figure does not specify London’s gulp of that market but a combination of factors, such as climate, pollution, population and tourism, suggest that even 400 million litres would be a conservative estimate. This chapter investigates the impact of the resulting flow of plastic waste from discarded water bottles and the efforts of environmental campaigners to combat it by reducing demand.

In the belly of the MRF

For each bottle of water consumed, a container is disposed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, London’s recycling infrastructure was not as sophisticated as today’s material recovery industry but, recycled or not, those discarded bottles usually become someone else’s problem. For Jarno Stet, Westminster Council’s Waste Services Manager, the seasonal rise in plastic bottle waste from all cold beverages, including water, is a given. The stylish Dutchman, just 30 despite his prominent role in the world of waste, knows that water makes up a significant proportion of that plastic mountain. However, the figures are not precise
because the plastic water bottles that do make it into the recycling stream are processed with other clear plastic soft drink containers. One quantity of waste that Stet can be more specific about is the London Marathon, naturally a large-scale water-guzzling affair. He candidly states of the Marathon’s five-tonne bottled water footprint: ‘They come in and trash the place and we clear it up; that’s the unfortunate thing about it.’
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Hosting the first London Marathon was a coup for Westminster in 1980, well before Stet’s time. No doubt the runners and spectators left litter, but certainly not on today’s scale. As we learned in the previous chapter, bottled water is highly unlikely to have been available then as an affordable product.

In the 21st century, Stet and his colleagues’ swift operation ensures that litter from such major events is invisible. Fortunately, advance planning for inevitable waste production ensures that these plastics do make it into the recycling stream. They are processed in one of two ‘materials recovery facilities’ that Westminster City Council contracts to deal with its recycling. Like water, the waste management industry has been transformed by European Union environmental policies. High landfill taxes now make recycling an economic imperative for local authorities.

Annually, 6,000 tonnes of potential recyclables from Westminster are sent to a materials recovery facility in Wandsworth, in the suburbs of southwest London.
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These recycling centres are known in the business as MRFs (pronounced ‘murph‘). This facility is one of ten across the capital that local authorities can use for large-scale recycling. A further 9,000 tonnes of waste is dispatched annually to a MRF in Greenwich.
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The Wandsworth MRF, in the industrial suburbs of southwest London, is run by Cory Environmental Services. Intriguingly on Smuggler’s Way, its Thames-side location facilitated the transportation of waste by river. Previously, as Stet explains, it was a ‘transfer station’ built by the Greater London
Council. When landfill dominated, waste used to be loaded directly onto barges bound for Mucking Marshes near Tilbury in Essex. Nowadays, recovered materials are more likely to leave the depot in lorries. A common cargo departing from Wandsworth is a bale of plastic.

Inside the building, a soundproof door separates the reception area from the percussive din of the MRF’s enormous waste recovery machinery. On entry, an anteroom provides a gentle start for the uninitiated, though the scale of what lies ahead can be sensed through the sonic bleed into that space. A large conveyor belt runs through it at waist height and a few staff are positioned there to watch out for items to remove from the recyclables stream. Microwaves, for instance, are not uncommon in the flow of disposables. Around the corner, the cathedral-scale machinery is on display, where high-speed belts run at diagonal and horizontal angles. At the mouth of the machinery, a vast concrete pit receives cargo from recycling lorries of circa ten tonnes a load, creating a visual cacophony of waste. Its scale appears to reduce the recycling trucks to toys. Hovering above the pit, a crane arm lowers sporadically to grab two-tonne loads and transfers them to the first conveyor belt. How can the relatively delicate dimensions of a plastic bottle be discerned from this massive sea of waste?

Moving further into aisles of industrial machinery on metal walkways and staircases, the maze of sorting devices starts to reveal some order. 2D and 3D are separated by what look like rows of metal ‘teeth’. Cardboard is whipped off high into the air on one conveyor belt whilst another shoots drink bottles along to their next phase of sorting. That stage separates the mass of all bottles into different plastic categories with the aid of a machine programmed to read the mass of the objects, resulting in opaque milk containers being divided from Poly Ethylene Teraphthalate, or PET, soft drink bottles. Using an illuminated heat-reading sensor, on detecting a bottle’s mass, that bottle hops via a puff of
air onto a separate chute. Bottle after bottle is picked out and ‘puffed’ away, as a variety of other objects run off the end of the belt and are discarded. But this is not all. As a green bottle approaches the end of the belt, another noise can be heard which signals the need to create a stronger air response: the green bottle is sent to a separate chute from the translucent bottles. The machine’s intelligence is not flawless. An operative monitoring its performance calmly pulls out a couple of odd slippers that made it into the clear plastic bottle stream.

All translucent drink bottles, including water, should theoretically make their way into a dedicated chute. The aim is to keep the PET stream uncontaminated so that a bale of clear, coloured or opaque plastic is produced. Depending on the season, the Wandsworth facility recovers between 14 and 28 bales of plastic per day. Weighing in at three tonnes, a PET bale can fetch up to £2000 on the open market. Less transparent is who pays these prices for recycled plastic, or where the bales are destined for after Wandsworth. Westminster’s recyclables become the property of Cory Environmental Services once they enter its facility and that private company is not bound to reveal its list of PET clients.

A 2008 research report published by the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), instigated to measure the CO
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impact of exporting recycled paper and plastic bottles abroad, stressed the recent growth of the market: ‘In 2007…half a million tonnes of recovered plastics were exported. The principal destination for these exports was China.’
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The Government agency WRAP concluded that the practice of shipping containers of plastic bales to China was environmentally sustainable on the basis of the CO
₂
emissions that it calculated at that time, however the system of cost and profits from plastic recycling between the public and private sectors seems ethically dubious.
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More positively, a local client for PET bales that Jarno Stet highlights is Dagenham’s Closed Loop Recycling
centre on the periphery of East London. At that centre, another phase of recycling produces re-usable plastic for either new drink bottles or other forms of food packaging. The centre proudly claims on its website to be the U.K.’s first ‘food-grade plastics recycler’.
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These glimpses of the world of waste management — often out of our sight in industrial estates on the city’s fringes — reveal well-oiled businesses; ones that are part of a sector valued at over £11 billion in the United Kingdom (2011).
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Certainly, many jobs are created by the waste industry but the notion that the polluter pays, in the case of products such as bottled water, is far from established. Most plastic water bottles do not make it into the recycling stream at all. Stet demonstrated this fact by an experimental survey of plastic bottle waste in a selection of Westminster’s bins on a hot July day.

Donning a pair of a member of his team’s gloves, he sorted through Piccadilly Circus’s bins after a single morning of waste disposal. As a passionate advocate of recycling, for him it was a sobering confrontation with the items that will never make it into the recycling stream. This is ‘contaminated’ waste, in which plastic bottles mix with the dregs from disposable coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches, for instance. Such waste, at least in Westminster, is no longer bound for landfill. Stet puts this waste policy in a nutshell: ‘Throwing it into a hole in the ground is just silly because it sits there and doesn’t do anything.’ He is a subscriber to the philosophy of waste-as-resource. Instead of land-filling, all of Westminster’s contaminated waste is burnt in a high-tech ‘Energy from Waste’ facility. The excess power produced is sold to the National Grid.

Even so, the human labour involved in clearing up and transporting these materials, and the carbon footprint generated in the process, is significant. Westminster City Council subcontracts the recruitment and management of its waste collection and recycling to the multinational company Veolia. 500 people are
employed in Westminster’s waste and recycling operation alone. Two of these operatives, who usually start work at 4.30am, assist Stet with his experiment in their Chinatown depot. They pile the would-be recyclables into neat mounds of plastic, paper and cardboard. Apart from his gloves, Stet looks incongruous performing this whiffy task in neatly pressed suit trousers and a crisp, stripy shirt. He appears dismayed by the results. Not one bag is devoid of plastic water bottles. In fact, they dominate the other soft drinks type by three to one. From six bags, more than thirty water bottles are extracted and that is only one morning of consumption, in one small patch of the capital. Multiply this average of four-to-six bottles per bin by the 2,000 waste receptacles on Westminster’s streets (give or take a few), and the figure for a morning’s contaminated water bottle waste is upwards of 8,000 bottles. Given the climbing temperatures on the hot July morning of the experiment, the figure is bound to be higher than on a drizzly February morning, but it remains alarming. Strikingly, a plethora of water brands were represented in the extracted bottles, testifying to the fact that for those who passed through Piccadilly Circus, on that morning at least, there was no favoured water tipple. Brand choice seemed arbitrary and therefore it suggests that drinkers are more concerned with the bottles’ contents rather than the claims printed on the plastic strip glued around their middles. Some of the bottles reveal that only a few swigs were taken before they were discarded. Schweppes Abbey Well is one brand that was recovered from the general waste stream. This was London’s ‘official water’ for the 2012 Olympic Games, an event purported to be a bastion of sustainable innovation.

The Cause

Post-Millennium, as climate change became a mainstream topic of debate, bottled water arose as a campaign focus in the agendas of some London-based environmental campaigners. Sustain was
one of the first organisations to target bottled water consumption as an environmental problem from its ‘better food and farming’ perspective.
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The charity has an umbrella membership working nationally but is London-based. As a food product, bottled water fell under its remit. Sustain published a report in 2006 entitled
Have You Bottled It? How drinking tap water can help save you and the planet
. The publication’s author undermined a notion that was central to mineral and spring water consumers from Queen Elizabeth I to 1980s Yuppies: that bottled water was a health product. By querying the virtues of twenty-first century plastic packaging, in terms of the chemicals involved in its production and the uncertainty over whether those could leach into the water, or even absorb external toxins, the rows of bottled water illustrating the report take on a more sinister hue. Chemical leaching from plastic is a common health concern on many American websites that question the merits of bottled water, but little conclusive evidence exists to prove that the substance in question —‘bisphenol a’ — is a health risk.
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Sustain’s anti-bottled water stance, however, is more firmly planted in the concept of water miles: ‘The concept of food miles, and the environmental damage they cause is now well-established but bottled water can also travel all around the world before we drink it.’
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This voyage certainly does not promote the notion of bottled water’s freshness in comparison to tap water. Most importantly for the report’s authors, choosing to drink tap over bottled water fulfils the ultimate goal of the internationally accepted priority of the ‘waste hierarchy’, ideally to
reduce
rather than recycle or reuse.