Parched City (34 page)

Drought is a natural disaster that must be considered in the U.K. and other developed world nations and hence the concept of a national water grid is rightly on the environmental, political and water industry agenda. That is simply not a drinking water issue because of the quantities of consumption in question. As stated at the beginning of the book, hosepipe bans are an inconvenience but not being able to pour a glass of water out of the tap is practically unimaginable and could soon be solved from alternative sources without the need for emergency bottled water, with appropriate planning.

As well as countering the flow of bottled water products, issues of social justice and welfare also need to be factored into the hydration equation even in industrialised nations. If we forget to refill a bottle from the tap to bring outdoors with us, should our only hydration recourse be to pay an unethically high price for drinking water, or to beg an employee in a café to hand over some free water? What if that thirsty person is ill, heavily pregnant, elderly, a toddler, penniless or homeless? Or what if that person is none of those vulnerable categories, but simply a thirsty citizen in need of a modest quantity of water to rehydrate? Water is fundamental to maintaining all of our bodily functions, so how can citizens be effectively denied access to it? How does the United Nations landmark announcement in 2002 that access to safe drinking water is a core human right translate to the context of the developed world globalised city?

Published in 2001, economist Riccardo Petrella’s polemic
The Water Manifesto
argues for a World Water Contract to ensure basic and consistent access to water ‘for every human being and every human community’.
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His critique of the transition of water’s
management in many countries from the public to the private sector and its valuation in market-based terms, rather than as a ‘non-substitutable common social asset’ remains valid in
England and Wales today (notably not in Scotland, where the water and waste-water industry was not privatised in 1989). As a Dubliner originally, I was downcast to read in Petrella’s account of water’s commodification that an international agreement about re-categorising water as an ‘economic asset’, convened by the United Nations, was forged in 1992, in my home city.
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Less than ten years later, this economist was making a different plea to the international community, on the basis that water is not interchangeable with other commodities, particularly water needed for drinking. In Petrella’s words: ‘Basic access for
every human being
means that he or she can enjoy the minimum quantity of fresh drinking water that society considers necessary and indispensable to a decent life, and that the quality of this water is in accordance with world health norms.’
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His thesis has been hugely influential. In 2003 the United Nations published its conclusions from a committee interrogating drinking water’s place in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: ‘The Human Right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity’. The Committee further resolved that ‘the right to water is also inextricably linked to the right to the highest attainable standard of health’.
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Even though we might imagine that the need for this right to be addressed by the United Nations was legitimately focused on global injustices, particularly between the northern and southern hemispheres, the committee elaborated that the organisation had been ‘confronted continually with the widespread denial of the right to water in developing as well as developed countries’ (I emphasise that the health inequities between countries with and without adequate water and sanitations are intolerable and unjust).
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The United Nation’s recommendation about water rights within the covenant does, however, define the limits of
that human right to water spatially to the ‘household, educational institution and workplace’.
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If this spatial definition was broadened, then it could legally oblige public and private bodies to provide drinking water in the environs they own and manage. Employers, for instance, have to ensure that sufficient drinking water is available for their staff, as a statutory health and safety requirement.
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Hence the success of water cooler companies whose workers can be seen unloading their wares from vans in most of London’s office districts on a daily basis. Water coolers are children of America.

Fountains Abroad

Across the ‘pond’, there has been prolific anti-bottled-water activism in the last decade. The town of Concord in Massachusetts followed Bundanoon’s example and banned bottled water from its shops in 2010.
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A particularly vocal critic of the bottled water industry’s ethics and the decline of public drinking fountains is the water scientist and environmental campaigner Dr Peter Gleick. He is clearly incensed by the ubiquity of bottled water in his book
Bottled and Sold:
‘Water fountains used to be everywhere, but they have slowly disappeared as public water is increasingly pushed out in favor of private control and profit.’
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Gleick concludes: ‘If public sources of drinking water were more accessible, arguments about the convenience of bottled water would seem silly.’
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The environmental journalist Elizabeth Royte is equally incensed by the murky ethics of bottled water production. Her book,
Bottlemania
cites aspirational water drinking as one reason for the success of imported products in America when she recalls a time when ‘ordering imported water was classy; it improved the tone of a dinner party. Once that idea took hold in America, there was no going back’.
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Some anti-bottled-water activism in the U.S. has focused on the use of oil in bottle production. For instance, the documentary
Tapped
exposes the horrific health impacts of poor
air quality on residents living beside a plastic bottle manufacturer, with evidence of high rates of premature deaths from cancers associated with this industry’s production of air pollution.
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The Pacific Institute, of which Dr Peter Gleick is President, recently launched a website, in partnership with Google, to map America’s public drinking fountains and a downloadable app, called WeTap Map. At the time of writing, the project is in its infancy but it adds to information in the public domain about free water sources and is a stimulus for viral communication.

On WeTap’s blog, one enthusiastic contributor has posted a link to a list of Paris’s public fountains. Tourist blogs about Paris wax lyrical about the free hydration offer of Les Fontaines Wallace, or the Wallace Fountains. Their benefactor, the Anglo-Frenchman, Sir Richard Wallace donated the fountains to Paris following the destruction caused to the city during the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s. Sir Richard was politely offered advice from the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association but the playful aesthetic of his fountains suggests that he did not pay much heed to the English style of public fountain.
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His interpretation of the amenity type was rather different from England’s sombre granite fountains. Generously, Wallace personally financed over a hundred fountains to be built across Paris and his payback has come with immortalisation in a much-loved social architectural offering. They still serve the city today. Les Fontaines Wallaces’ distinctively decorative style in delicately wrought, yet robust, ivy-green cast iron features four Caryatids — female figures employed as structural supports — representing kindness, simplicity, charity and sobriety, who guard the precious public water. These fountains are lauded as a part of Paris’ architectural heritage and benefit locals and tourists alike. Their visual flamboyance seems to attract users and suggests that a little novelty factor can work well in some contexts. Also, the water they dispense is evidently trusted. A recent visitor to Paris
told me that she and her extended family availed of the Wallace Fountains on their holiday trek around the city over several days and saw others using them constantly. She recalled that they did buy bottled water initially, but then re-used those containers once they had located the fountains (not an uncommon practice and a reason why the refill bottle market jostles with lots of great designs, but, like umbrellas, water containers tend to go missing).

Given that Paris, like London, is awash with bottled water, it seems naïve to imagine that decades of habitual purchases of mineral and spring water will suddenly cease. My recent visit to Athens during the sweltering summer of 2012 showed a city also awash with bottled water but, curiously, there is a rather humane pact between sales outlets that all bottles retail for €0.50. This price is considerably less outlandish than bottled water sells for in most capital cities. In Greece’s dismal economic situation, even that price seems immoral when temperatures are 38 degree centigrade plus. I spotted a sole public fountain during a week in Athens (admittedly, that was not the focus of my trip), at an entrance to the national gardens. The amenity was not in great condition but one man, who appeared to be homeless took a long drink from its upward pointing jet. I followed his lead. The water tasted good, particularly because that gulp was free. A fridge in the kiosk just next to the fountain glistened with rows of water bottles.

If Athens had its own Fontaines Wallaces, would bottled water sales fall in the summer months? Unfortunately, no such studies have been conducted (at least that this researcher has located). Studies of Geneva’s and Rome’s rich public water bounties could provide valuable data about water drinking behaviours. At least those cities have retained their historic civic fountains, so people there are free to choose whether to trust public water supplies or pay for bottled water. In Spain, such architectural heritage has rapidly declined according to a group of artists based in Madrid. Luzinterruptus claim that 50% of the city’s public fountains have
desiccated during the last thirty years. To highlight their demise, the collective staged a provocative guerrilla artwork for four hours in January 2012 and called for the restoration of the city’s stock of drinking fountains. The temporary protest-cum-artwork
Agua que has de beber
— which translates literally to ‘water you must drink‘
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— was mounted during the night for maximum visual effect. Cascades of small recycled glass jars were attached to the spouts and dry bowls of four unused public fountains and illuminated to simulate flowing water.
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At the base of the objects, more identical jars spread out into a ‘pool’, seeping into the street. Skilfully, the image simultaneously conveyed both water waste and the unnecessary flow of water bottles into the city, and the waste the latter produces. Photography of the protest preserves the sculptural interventions on the artists’ website for further dissemination after the fountains carcasses were restored to their normal state of dysfunction. The artwork’s lament for the loss of simple civic amenities more broadly symbolises the decline in the management of public spaces for citizens’ benefit. It also reminds us that not all ‘progress’ is good.

Return to the Thames

Luzinterruptus is unlikely to have received an invite for its members to travel across from Madrid to Barcelona for Zenith International’s 9th Global Bottled Water Congress in October 2012. There, The Coca-Cola Company, Danone and Nestlé Waters, amongst others, were scheduled to discuss how to keep on top of the market ‘by unlocking more natural value’.
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In November 2012, Zenith International’s tour continued with the UK Bottled Water Industry conference in London, entitled
Green
Light for Bottled Water
. Alongside brand development tips, delegates could attend a session on ‘improving recycling’ with a speaker from the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (yes, the government department), or hear how to reduce the environmental impact of plastic packaging with a
senior technologist from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (also a U.K. government agency).
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Positively, credible sustainability advocates are on board the corporate water road show; however their presence is also an admission that bottled water is with us for the foreseeable future. Rather than the ‘polluter pays’, this policy seems to be ‘work with the polluters’ because we have no hope of stopping them.

On a website promoting the UK Bottled Water Industry conference, the sole image is a night shot of the London Eye.
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The photograph shows the illuminated big wheel structure glazed with a neon-pink hue in a tranquil expanse of the Thames. The river itself is not shown in a critical light. In fact, it looks clean, even pristine in a shade of peaceful midnight blue. After my long trawl through London’s drinking water history, I cannot help but find the choice of image somewhat ironic. A bottled water conference for London is not advertised with the aid of an image of a rural water wilderness hundreds of miles from the city but with a thoroughly urban representation of the city’s water source. Actually, to me, the image is an apt reflection of the parallel drinking water stream that flows wastefully on into the twenty-first century city’s second decade.

I remain optimistic that the Water Framework Directive’s implementation will improve the quality of London’s raw water sources by 2015 and, in doing so, begin to modify the environmental cost of water treatment practices in this century. But I do not believe we should idealise the era of pre-water treatment era. This industrial system has evolved in a large part to pragmatically cope with an industrialised society. Even all being well on the pollution front, we have to consider the impact of natural or industrial disasters on water catchments, for instance those increasingly wrought by climate change, such as flooding. Those freshwater ‘gardens of Eden’ owned by the bottled water companies presents land ownership and water abstraction licence issues that need further scrutiny, globally. In terms of the
Water Framework Directive, citizens should have free access to information and progress on that monumental project. If raw water intended for drinking is effectively protected from pollution and treatment measures are reduced, the argument that bottled water is superior to tap water will seriously falter.