Parched City (28 page)

Early in 2012, LOCOG’s Head of Venue Development, Paul May, sheds more light on the free drinking water plan. For him, the permanent infrastructure built under the Olympic Delivery Authority contract simply cannot meet the drinking water
commitment.
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When asked about pre-existing drinking fountains in the venues; he can only confirm that the temporary basketball arena building (the one with the elbowed-out skin) was kitted out. It is evident from the conversation that drinking fountains are, unsurprisingly, not a must-have feature of the Olympic venues. May struggles to remember which venues, if any, have them. This poses a problem for the overlay team.

May reveals that the free drinking water offer for spectators will be a convoluted injection of temporary plumbing installations throughout the venues. Strangely, this contract is not with London 2012’s official ‘provider’ for water and sewerage services locally — Thames Water — but with a Dutch company MTD. May qualifies: ‘They’re actually the world leader in this sort of infrastructure. They’ve done previous Games before and major events so we have quite an experienced supplier.’ Where possible, MTD plugged into Thames Water’s mains pipes, but for venues where this is practically difficult, such as Hyde Park, water was to be transported via a bowser (water tanker). MTD was also tasked with installing the ‘drinking water outlets’, or temporary drinking fountains. May promises that these facilities will be well signposted, though what they will look like was unknown when we spoke. A quick browse on the company’s website shows, under the heading ‘accessories’, an image of utilitarian stainless steel trough-like sinks.
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Design-wise they certainly do not overwhelm or excite me, but modernists may well applaud these plainly functional forms. For London 2012 staff, May was also confident that they would have water on tap in their dining quarters via ‘bubblers’ provided by the caterers (mains fed water coolers), to which MTD were to distribute mains water. From a spectator and staff perspective, therefore, the possibility of choosing the tap over the bottle seems plausible.

The people with less choice, from the plans described, were the athletes and the media. Both Bulley and May stress the need for portable water. May explains: ‘Welfare of athletes has to come
first, so they‘ll be very mobile, they‘ll need a bottle water solution so they can carry it around.’ What did Olympic athletes do in the 1950s, I muse? For the international sports’ media representatives, free bottled water is an entitlement that comes along with their Olympic press accreditation.

Even if no London 2012 spectator or employee chose to buy a bottle of Schweppes Abbey Well — the only unflavoured, still water option that was available inside Olympic venues —10,500 athletes and 20,000 media personnel to be kept hydrated.
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Bottles of Schweppes Abbey Well have to be transported by some means from Morpeth in Northumberland, where ‘every last drop has been naturally filtered through water bearing white

Vending machine, Heathrow Airport, 2012. Author’s own photograph.
sandstone for at least 3,000 years’, as Coca-Cola’s website states.
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Morpeth is 298 miles from London, with an estimated journey time of five hours and thirteen minutes from the Olympic Park in Stratford. Comparatively, Thames Water’s Coppermills Water Treatment Works, in Walthamstow, practically neighbours the Olympic site. Moreover, pipes rather than vehicles transport the latter’s product.

Dedicated Schweppes Abbey Well vending machines across London stoked with ‘the Official Water of the London 2012 Olympic Games’ signalled that the unsustainable face of Olympic hydration will be spilled far beyond the confines of the official venues to the global city’s most profitable tranches of public retail space.
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Airport-style security has certainly benefitted bottled water sales. The seemingly unstoppable flow of bottled water to locations, such as airports, where demand for hydration is high and access to tap water access is limited, or unavailable, is something that incenses the founder of tapwater.org, who would ‘really like to see Coca-Cola’s sales plummet’.
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Council Pop

Michael Green calls tapwater.org a movement rather than an organisation, despite its title: ‘When all’s said and done its H
₂
O; there’s no difference between what’s in a plastic bottle and what comes out of your tap. They can call it what they want. It hydrates your body.’ His no-nonsense view of the subject stems from a Yorkshire childhood, as he explains: ‘Me and my brother would come in from playing football all sweaty and go to the fridge and there’d be nothing. Me mother used to say “well get some Council Pop”’ i.e. tap water. His mother’s witty tap water ‘re-branding’ stayed with Green. When his London-based environmental movement was incubating, he decided that tapwater.org was probably a more sensible title than councilpop.org. The latter’s potential ambivalence was an association that might dilute Green’s polemical stance on promoting
tap water. So tapwater.org was born, with a mission to make piped water access outside the home or workplace easier, and tastier.

The movement’s founder is an unlikely environmentalist and anti-capitalist campaigner as a former property developer; and a successful one. Foreseeing the 2008 economic crash, he sold his property stock and headed for Sri Lanka. There, he put his carpentry skills to use on a post-tsunami rebuilding project. He recalls how this interlude, which morphed from four weeks into four months, allowed his long-standing antipathy towards bottled water float into the foreground, quite literally. One episode was on New Year’s Eve, when he saw a Sri Lankan beach awash with plastic drink bottles. Having been a WaterAid volunteer at five Glastonbury festivals, Green was versed in the global injustices surrounding water and sanitation. He wanted to do something to address the production of plastic pollution, but he realised that his battleground lay where the choice between tap and bottled water presented equally safe products.

When he returned to live in London, Green was spurred further on his mission when he read a newspaper article about Neil Barron’s carafe design for
London on Tap:
‘I rang him up and asked him if he would be interested in designing a bottle for me. And he is mad passionate about the hatred of plastic: just the same as me.’ The refillable bottle that Barron and Green conceived is stainless steel, with vacuum insulation to keep its tap water contents well chilled, for up to twenty hours, as the website claims.
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For Green the pièce de resistance was the design for the bottle’s cap, which is now patented. The cap hides a secret storage compartment where tapwater.org’s brand of flavoured tablets can be stashed. Dissolve these tablets and Thames water is swiftly transformed by orange, strawberry, or peach flavours, or with ‘more exotic red tea and sea buckthorn flavours’ (one 5 pence tablet apparently enlivens 500ml of water).

Barron’s ‘lifebottle’ is an object with high design values that
took some two years to develop and perfect. Lifebottles can be purchased from tapwater.org’s online shop, which was launched in 2011, and seems to operate as slickly as any retailer (clearly, Green’s commercial acumen comes in handy). The bottles sell in a strident matt orange colour; an opaque white coat, or in a raw, utilitarian (and hygienic) stainless steel. At £12 for a 350ml bottle and £15 for a one-litre bottle, the income their sale could generate might not be unsubstantial. Even so, Green is adamant that his project is not profit-driven: ‘The fact that we sell bottles is irrelevant to the scheme. You do not have to have our bottle. It’s open to everybody.’

Like Aquatina’s inventor, Michael Green’s cohort is equally interested in where the refilling takes place, however, there is a critical difference as Green explains: ‘I don’t think that drinking water fountains in the twenty-first century are a viable working option personally. They’re strong words them. I’d love to think in the great, glossy romantic world they’d be fabulous but what you have to understand is that the councils won’t adopt them, they won’t clean them because they don’t have the finances to do that;’ (or possibly the will?). Green’s alternative strategy is to gain access to pre-existing taps by convincing businesses to join the refill movement. Those locations then join the tapwater.org map, which can be used as a downloadable phone application. Cafés across London have signed up as free drinking water sites and the 1,000 mark was surpassed during the week of this interview, in August 2011. Michael Green summarises the philosophy thus: ‘We thought, everybody has a tap so here you’ve got the perfect possibility to advertise, to promote small businesses. We’re never going to get Costa on board. We’re never going to get Starbucks. That’s great for me.’ Volunteers have signed up to help Green recruit these businesses and, then, it was London-centric. Green recounts how one volunteer, Ursula, ‘completely blitzed her area. There’s more [business on the map] in Chiswick than anywhere else’. A paid employee keeps the tap-water blogs flowing, with
posts that reflect a distinctly internationalist feel for the issue. Green’s other colleagues are freelance, but, when we spoke, he was bankrolling the whole operation himself.

Tapwater.org promotes its work at university green days, hoping to prevent the next generation from bottled water apathy and mobilise tap water enthusiasts. Green explains that this strand of work was initially driven by the organisation, but that university sustainability officers started requesting tapwater.org’s participation in ‘green’ events. Consequently, it audited the drinking water offer in one London university and found that it had 135 bottled water machines. Not only was this quantity disturbing but, as Green utters incredulously: ‘Guess what they’re buying? Tap water!’ He would not name the institution in question. With students, Green finds the most successful anti-bottled water argument is economics. Top of the list on the Frequently Asked Questions page of the organisation’s website is a calculation for what the average person apparently spends on bottled water and other soft drinks in a lifetime: £25,000.
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Given that Michael Green’s anti-bottled water polemic is so focused on the huge profit margins made by bottled water purveyors, another of the entrepreneur’s ideas seems incongruous. He wanted to see refilling stations outside tube stations. Similarly to the Water UK, Waste Watch and Thames Water project, he also suggests that users should pay, for refills, ‘10p for a still water and 20p for a fizzy water’. Green argues that the charge can be justified because a service is being offered: ‘You’re getting water, you’re filtering it and you’re adding CO
₂
, so then they’re not buying tap water.’ Like Wastewatch, the organisation is no doubt thinking of ways to keep its operations afloat in the long-term, however such debates drive a fissure through the principle of free tap water as an alternative to expensive, unsustainable bottled water. The notion of an organisation other than a water company charging for tap water is potentially a dubious
practice, one that would undoubtedly need to be scrutinised by OFWAT, as the water industry’s economic regulator.

A single issue that London’s pro-tap-water lobby does concur on the quality of the product that they are in effect promoting. Twenty years ago, faith in tap water quality is something that environmental campaigners, such as Friends of the Earth (FOE), were unlikely to have been as gung-ho about. FOE recently urged its supporters not to consume bottled water: ‘Drink water from the tap instead — our water is much cleaner than it was 15 years ago thanks to EU laws, and is perfectly safe to drink.’
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This wholesale endorsement of tap water is mirrored by tapwater.org and Sustain, however their rhetoric is supported by sparse information about how tap water quality is actually delivered and assured. They applaud the product but do not explain in any detail why, suggesting that the facts might bore readers. For example, the language used on tapwater.org’s website to tout piped water is rather bland: ‘Independent tests show UK tap water is among the safest in the world.’
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How is such a vociferously agreed quality stamp achieved, particularly in the case of London’s, mythically, oft-recycled tap water? Should we implicitly trust the product endorsement delivered by the water industry, its inspectors, the Greater London Authority and environmentalists?

Chapter Ten

Public concern about London’s tap water surfaces sporadically. Hangovers from the water quality issues of the 1980s are materially displayed in the staple stock of water filtration products on supermarket shelves and their aisles dedicated to bottled water. Those bottles are also ubiquitous in pretty much any retail outlet with space for a fridge, where they can be highly profitable sidelines: gyms are a good example. Clearly convenience plays a role in the non-domestic-use bottled water market, but the presence of the product as a staple in supermarkets does point to home consumption either as a health-based preference to sugary drinks, or as an alternative because of, some, genuine fears about tap water’s long-term damage to health.

One accidental interviewee for this book was a successful painter who I met working part-time at a hair salon. She was performing pre-cut hair washes to help pay her bills. Originally from the modestly populated city of Belfast, the painter instinctively felt mistrustful and even physically repelled by the idea of drinking London’s tap water when she moved here. Despite her financial struggles, the artist continued to buy Evian.

This instinct to reject London’s drinking water could be attributed to two facts that do separate piped water from the product in a plastic or glass package. First, tap water is derived from
both
ground and surface water sources and, second, surface
water requires more treatment than ground water. In the case of spring or mineral bottled water, this substance is siphoned from aquifers or springs rather than rivers and therefore consists solely of groundwater. The latter product is also sealed in a way that tap water cannot be; perhaps a characteristic that some consumers find reassuring as a guarantor of purity. Just like tap water, under EU regulations, all mineral and spring water must be tested to ensure that it is bacteriologically, chemically and radioactively safe for human consumption. However, a unique selling point is that bottled water remains chemically untreated, or, more correctly, unsterilized. The only treatments permitted under current legislation for mineral water include ‘an authorised ozone-enriched air oxidation technique’
²
, filtering to remove ‘unstable elements’
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(for example iron and sulphur compounds) and either the introduction or elimination of carbon dioxide. Spring water is also permitted to have either of the latter procedures or ozone treatment.

English law states that that the ‘treatment of natural mineral waters and spring waters with ozone-enriched air shall only be carried out if it is for the purpose of separating compounds of iron, manganese, sulphur and arsenic from water in which they occur naturally at source.’
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For many consumers, the notion of non-sterilised and therefore chemically untreated water is appealing. As the above list of naturally occurring substances shows, nature can also be toxic. Still, it is understandable that we might perceive rivers to be more volatile and susceptible to pollution, particularly from illegal sources, than enclosed groundwater. Could it follow that those who remain doubtful about drinking from the tap relate its outflow to the quality of London’s river water?

This chapter enters the expert realm of contemporary drinking water production and inspection to find out if there is any basis to mistrust the safety of London’s tap water.

Police and Producers

Thames Water’s media team did not initially welcome the opportunity to facilitate a conversation between this little known drinking water enthusiast and the drinking water experts inside the industry’s private gates, or entertain a site visit.
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In the context of England and Wales, this barrier is also a reminder that tap water is produced by a corporation rather than by the public sector. Thames Water, or any other private water and wastewater service provider in England and Wales, has no duty to furnish me with access onto its private land to observe how drinking water, or sewage, is treated. One can appreciate Thames Water’s reluctance to grant a visit to me on the grounds of the state of high alert for potential acts of bio-terrorism in London, though I would have happily been screened on that basis. My communication with Thames Water’s press officers leaves me with the feeling that they prefer to keep enquiries for more information, beyond the scope of the company’s website, at bay. This is a shame given that no other popular book dedicated to the subject of London’s drinking water has been written prior to this one (certainly by November 2012). I am grateful that Thames Water has deposited the records of its predecessors at London Metropolitan Archives (City of London) where the general public can access the rich industrial and social heritage of this city’s water supply. For any lay person to gain a more contemporary appreciation of the engineering, environmental and scientific issues facing today’s water industry, only one London water company actively encourages schools to visit its facilities at the time of writing (Sutton and East Water PLC).
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Working with a sociotechnical approach to human water consumption, the Australian academic Zoe Safoulis is critical of the water industry’s voice of authority because it often excludes the possibility of cultural and social dialogue about the interdependence of consumer behaviour and technology.
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Safoulis dubs this authoritative stance by water industry professionals over the
perspective of the user as ‘Big Water’. Grand water engineering conquests such as dams and desalination plants display the industry’s expertise, as well as its economic power and technological control over access to natural resources.
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End users cower under the monumental scale of these grand feats, with little possibility of critiquing their conception or continuation as best models of practice. Such big technologies obscure our view of what goes on inside the water industry and whether we have any agency to shape its operations as consumers.

Highly mediated public relations strategies limit our gaze into the water industry. On Thames Water’s website, one can read all about the amazing Ring Main, via which 1,300 million litres of water can be circulated, in a tunnel twenty metres below the depth of the Tube. It can serve Londoners up a freshwater cocktail with a dash of groundwater (from the New River for instance), mixed with a good measure of Lee or Thames surface water, or both. Virtually, one can snatch glimpses of the inner sancta of the water industry, but these corporate videos do not let the viewer linger over the messier process of abstracting raw water and its eventual refinement at the water treatment works. On the website, simplified pedagogical graphics simulating the water treatment process are useful on one level, but they cannot replace a more visceral, complex experience of the technological realm of the twenty-first century water treatment plant and an insight into the views of the people who are responsible for the production of up to two billion litres of water daily. Fortunately, a follow-up letter to the Chief Executive Officer of Thames Water prompted my enquiry to be revisited. Steve White, Drinking Water Strategy Manager for Thames Water, offered a telephone interview, explaining that physical access to a drinking water treatment works was not possible because of internal logistics coupled with my stated deadline (naturally, this was some months after my initial contact). Fortunately, White was generous with his time on the telephone.

At the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) my request for an interview with a senior member this organisation was met with a degree of surprise, perhaps about the need for science professionals to engage with my lay approach to their fields of expertise.

Fortunately, the Chief Inspector of Drinking Water at the DWI, Dr Jeni Colbourne, did agree to meet in person to discuss her extensive knowledge of London’s drinking water. Her organisation, formed post-privatisation in 1990 as chapter eight explained, is tasked ‘to check that the water companies in England and Wales supply safe drinking water that is acceptable to consumers and meets the standards set down in law’.
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On the DWI’s website, common consumer concerns about tap water in England and Wales are reflected in the main subject headings of the DWI’s choice of downloadable advice leaflets. Fluoride; Lead; Nitrate; Pesticides and Pharmaceuticals are a few of the titles one can peruse.
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Most of the leaflets are designed to dispel all concerns. Lead is one substance that still lingers in the pipes of some homes that were built before the late 1970s (make sure to check that the pipes connecting your home with the mains supply have been converted to non lead-based materials).

Despite the organisation’s title, the DWI does not carry out primary tests. It audits the tests that the water companies perform themselves and also the laboratories where they take place. A 2009 review of the organisation’s practices pointed out that ‘since 2007 [the] DWI has fundamentally shifted its regulatory approach to one which is focused on risks to water quality and safety’, suggesting that testing is rather run-of-the-mill.
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In Jeni Colbourne’s
Drinking Water 2011
report (published after my interview with the Inspector) Thames Water was documented for some quality concern ‘events’, yet overall the company achieved a 99.98% rating for its product in that year.
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One event categorised as ‘significant’ happened when a procedure failed at the Hampton water treatment works for a
period of one hour.
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Part of the chlorination process seems to have been the issue from the published notes, but details are minimal. It is clear that even such a one-off error, even for such a short time could potentially have extremely serious consequences.

Before Jeni Colbourne became the Chief Inspector of Drinking Water for England and Wales she explains that she ‘was responsible, in various ways for the testing and the safety of London’s drinking water supply from 1974 to 2003’.
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Her responsibilities started at Thames Water Authority in 1974 and continued post-privatisation at Thames Water PLC. Despite the fact, as she puts it, ‘that the badge changed on the door several times’ during this period, Colbourne believes that her job has always been public health protection. She seems proud that her first post in the industry was as a scientist in the ‘world’s leading laboratory for microbiology’ (the first designated Drinking Water Quality Centre of Excellence). She worked in the purpose-built water examination laboratory, constructed for the Metropolitan Water Board (MWB) in the late 1930s on Rosebury Avenue in Islington. A place, she comments, that is now ‘posh flats’.

Our conversation takes place at the Inspectorate’s Thames-side offices, just a few hundred metres from the Houses of Parliament within the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Inside the open-plan office, the only hints of the industrial water environment are some yellow hard hats peppered about on coat stands. Refreshment is offered: a glass of water, naturally.

The grey-haired, yet youthfully exuberant, Professor pinpoints the factors that make London’s water heritage so precious locally and on the global drinking water research stage. For instance, the MWB was the first organisation to publish drinking water examination data: ‘The unique thing about London was that it was transparent. You’ve got 110 years of records.’ Colbourne continues to inhabit the examination and
research sphere that Dr Houston created, but now she is removed from the production of drinking water. Steve White, on the other hand, is on the front line of supplying 6.6 million people with drinking quality water, daily, on behalf of Thames Water.
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Unsurprisingly, he moves in the same professional circles as Jeni Colbourne. Despite her public sector status as an inspector of his private sector sphere, they collaborate strategically amongst a highly specialised pool of experts. As a drinking water strategist, White’s role ‘involves understanding the quality of our drinking water and making sure we are doing, and planning to do, what is necessary to make it safe to drink’.
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Colbourne emphasises, ‘testing the water doesn’t make it safe’ but its method of supply and treatment should.

From Wholesome to GAC Sandwiches

Safety is a constituent of the legal term used to define water that is fit for human consumption: wholesome. The term is loaded for water industry professionals. Spelled ‘holsome’ in the sixteenth century
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, its basic meaning — that water should be a good element of one’s diet — has endured, but our understanding of water’s role in health, and food hygiene, has utterly transformed. In England and Wales’ current drinking water quality legislation, wholesomeness refers to water supplied ‘for such purposes as consist in or include, cooking, drinking, food preparation or washing’.
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On the basis of this consumption and use it must not contain ‘any micro-organism…or parasite…or any substance at a concentration or value which could constitute a potential danger to human health’.
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The list of twenty-six chemicals in the legislation somewhat dwarfs the microbiological tally of four potential pathogens, however all water experts working at Colbourne’s and White’s level must have a proficiency in biology, chemistry and understand engineering processes and technologies.

By telephone, Steve White relays in a pondering voice the
stages via which London’s water should arrive at the wholesome benchmark. He seems to pause at the well-stocked shelves of his mental water library, before swooping in on the precise word or phrase he is searching for. When he finds them, his enthusiasm for his job is evident. Abstraction, White explains, is actually the first stage of drinking water treatment; particularly in relation to surface water. Groundwater is less treated than surface water. Selecting raw surface water can be critical to the treatment it needs: ‘You imagine, there’s a plume of pollution coming down the river - the first thing you do is shut your intake so you can avoid that plume.’ Abstraction also involves the physical screening of water through structures such as metal grilles, which, as White says, ‘keep the canoeists and the dead sheep out!’ Smaller screening devices also sift out natural debris such as leaves and twigs.