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Authors: Emma M. Jones
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very grateful indeed. Her moral support throughout the project was unfaltering.
Grace Chapman, my partner, has been my emotional anchor. She has patiently listened to my various rants about drinking water over the last two and a half years, and occasionally now gets on the anti-bottled-water soapbox herself. Grace’s comments on the content of early chapters were both sharply critical and encouraging but, most of all, I thank her for putting up with me during grumpy spells and a long period of meagre income on my part. My resourceful cooking skills possibly have something to do with her tolerance.
Introduction
Water should be treated as a social and cultural good, and not primarily as an economic good. The manner of the realisation of the right to water must also be sustainable, ensuring that the right can be realised for present and future generations
.
(United Nations, 2002) 1
In spring 2012, Londoners had reason to contemplate their tap water less absentmindedly than usual. Drought is an apocalyptic word. Fears about the official state of drought were muted by the measure to combat it. ‘Hosepipe ban’ has a cosy, suburban twang. This phrase reassures us that, although lawns might turn crispy brown, our drinking water source is not seriously threatened. Since 2007, London’s water stress categorisation by the Environment Agency as ‘serious’ has not translated into a situation where essential water uses are curtailed. Not having drinking water on tap would be unimaginable in this leading world city.
Even if London’s tap water supply was temporarily suspended, the city is well served with an alternative, equally reliable drinking water source. Bottled water flows into London, as steadily as the subterranean pipes through which more than two billion litres of premium treated tap water are pumped daily. There is one significant difference; a standard bottled water brand, such as Coca Cola’s Schweppes Abbey Well (£1.60 for 500ml), is approximately 2462 times more expensive per litre than tap water (this figure is based on a metered supply). 2 Despite that price gulf, London luxuriates in a twin drinking water system for those who are able, and willing, to pay for both supplies. In the twenty-first century city, therefore, the spectre of prolonged thirst seems unlikely. This reality starkly contrasts with the estimated 780 million people elsewhere in the worldwho do not have access to a safe, reliable or affordable drinking water supply for their basic hydration or cooking needs. 3 Excessive drinking water choice in this developed world city is yet another example of how we have exceeded the limits of what we need to live well. As the recently updated, seminal, environmental polemic
Limits to Growth
asserts about unsustainable economic growth and modes of production, ‘the world is in overshoot mode’. 4 Put simply, we consume and produce more than we need. My real question is how might we change this paradigm, at least for one essential product?
London’s drinking water excess is inherently flawed, both environmentally and ethically. Environmentally, sufficient energy; human resources; materials and money are lavished on the treatment of raw water to produce tap water of a quality that both meets and way exceeds our needs. Tap water standards produce the same consumable whether it is poured into one’s mouth or down one’s toilet, or used to mix cement (for the latter example, apologies to those builders who strive to employ grey water technologies). In 2011, a desalination plant even joined Thames Water’s arsenal to quench Londoners’ thirst. It performs alchemy on the tidal reaches of the river to produce freshwater.
As we know, this resource is increasingly politicised, globally, in the context of climate change, but freshwater is also a pawn between competing economic ideologies and nations. Such machinations determine how water abstraction is licensed through land ownership, how the aquatic
Grace Chapman, my partner, has been my emotional anchor. She has patiently listened to my various rants about drinking water over the last two and a half years, and occasionally now gets on the anti-bottled-water soapbox herself. Grace’s comments on the content of early chapters were both sharply critical and encouraging but, most of all, I thank her for putting up with me during grumpy spells and a long period of meagre income on my part. My resourceful cooking skills possibly have something to do with her tolerance.
Introduction
Water should be treated as a social and cultural good, and not primarily as an economic good. The manner of the realisation of the right to water must also be sustainable, ensuring that the right can be realised for present and future generations
.
(United Nations, 2002) 1
In spring 2012, Londoners had reason to contemplate their tap water less absentmindedly than usual. Drought is an apocalyptic word. Fears about the official state of drought were muted by the measure to combat it. ‘Hosepipe ban’ has a cosy, suburban twang. This phrase reassures us that, although lawns might turn crispy brown, our drinking water source is not seriously threatened. Since 2007, London’s water stress categorisation by the Environment Agency as ‘serious’ has not translated into a situation where essential water uses are curtailed. Not having drinking water on tap would be unimaginable in this leading world city.
Even if London’s tap water supply was temporarily suspended, the city is well served with an alternative, equally reliable drinking water source. Bottled water flows into London, as steadily as the subterranean pipes through which more than two billion litres of premium treated tap water are pumped daily. There is one significant difference; a standard bottled water brand, such as Coca Cola’s Schweppes Abbey Well (£1.60 for 500ml), is approximately 2462 times more expensive per litre than tap water (this figure is based on a metered supply). 2 Despite that price gulf, London luxuriates in a twin drinking water system for those who are able, and willing, to pay for both supplies. In the twenty-first century city, therefore, the spectre of prolonged thirst seems unlikely. This reality starkly contrasts with the estimated 780 million people elsewhere in the worldwho do not have access to a safe, reliable or affordable drinking water supply for their basic hydration or cooking needs. 3 Excessive drinking water choice in this developed world city is yet another example of how we have exceeded the limits of what we need to live well. As the recently updated, seminal, environmental polemic
Limits to Growth
asserts about unsustainable economic growth and modes of production, ‘the world is in overshoot mode’. 4 Put simply, we consume and produce more than we need. My real question is how might we change this paradigm, at least for one essential product?
London’s drinking water excess is inherently flawed, both environmentally and ethically. Environmentally, sufficient energy; human resources; materials and money are lavished on the treatment of raw water to produce tap water of a quality that both meets and way exceeds our needs. Tap water standards produce the same consumable whether it is poured into one’s mouth or down one’s toilet, or used to mix cement (for the latter example, apologies to those builders who strive to employ grey water technologies). In 2011, a desalination plant even joined Thames Water’s arsenal to quench Londoners’ thirst. It performs alchemy on the tidal reaches of the river to produce freshwater.
As we know, this resource is increasingly politicised, globally, in the context of climate change, but freshwater is also a pawn between competing economic ideologies and nations. Such machinations determine how water abstraction is licensed through land ownership, how the aquatic
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