Bottled water ban: A recap

   By Tim Wallace*

The success of the campaign in the NSW town of Bundanoon to become the world's first to ban bottled water will rightly inspire small towns around the globe – if not for environmental reasons then at least for tourism ones.
   It may not necessarily have put the hamlet on the world map but has certainly lifted its profile: 24 hours after the community voted for the ban “Bundanoon” returned about 169,000 references in a well-known search engine; “Bundanoon + bottle ban”, meanwhile, returned 7,100 references. That's green-tinged social marketing par excellence!
   This is not to say that the local campaign was an opportunistic marketing exercise. It wasn't.      
   The vote (carried by 400-2 out of the town's total population of about 2000) was the culmination of a local community protest galvanised by the plans of beverage company Norlex Holdings to extract millions of litres of water from a local aquifer, truck it to Sydney, bottle it and then sell it off it off for the usual exorbitant margin.

“The Departmental ban seems like a no-brainer”

   Opportunism, however, might be an apt description for NSW Premier Nathan Rees' tapping into the flood of media interest by announcing that Government Departments would be banned from buying bottled water and, what's more, that his administration was considering a “public blitz” to warn of the high cost of bottled water.
   For a cash-strapped Government looking to save whatever money it can to afford expensive public campaigns touting its green credentials, the Departmental ban seems like a no-brainer.
   As Rees correctly pointed out, tap water is not just better for the environment but also for the bottom line:
   Which makes one wonder why it took the NSW Government so long to come up with this brilliant idea.
   But banning one particular product may well turn out to be environmental tokenism rather than good public policy.
   Quite apart from all the cries about the nanny-state it will engender, one does tend to wonder under what circumstances Government Departments saw fit to buy bottled water in the first place.
   Will the ban have them running to the tap with refillable containers, or simply buying other bottled beverages with higher associated carbon emissions - a fact bottlers have even twisted to promote their water as eco-friendly - instead?
   When will we hear about a Government procurement policy that factors in the environmental benefits and costs in all purchasing decisions, not just the ones that ostensibly save money and will score media coverage?
   Without taking anything away from the initiative of the good citizens of Bundanoon, there is a big question mark over a Government hopping on the environmental ban-wagon in pursuit of a few green brownie points.

“Bottled water is just about the purest legal scam yet invented”

   Let's not forget, also that the NSW Government continues to drag its heels on container deposit legislation, a scheme the South Australian experience shows would go a long way to increasing the recycling rate of plastic bottles (if not mitigate the carbon emissions associated with their production, filling and transport before purchase).
   Recycling of drink cans and bottles would increase by more than 20 per cent if a 10 cent refund scheme was introduced in NSW, according to Clean Up Australia, the Local Government Assocation (LGA) and the Shires Association.
   According to President of the LGA, Genia McCaffery, kerbside collection of recyclables costs well over $300 million a year nationally.
   "The time of the current voluntary National Packaging Covenant is clearly finished,” Ms McCaffery said.
   “It was flawed from the start and has done little if anything to stem the ever growing tide of drink containers."
   Yet last year, a private member's bill proposing a 10 cent deposit on containers was voted down by the combined weight of the Government and the Opposition.
   Don't get me wrong: I think bottled water is just about the purest legal scam yet invented.
   Snake-oil merchants had nothing on the modern marketing machine that manages to convince consumers to invest their identity in a plastic bottle based on its shape and label.
   Anyone who buys bottled water when they can get exactly the same substance out of the tap for free is a fool deserving to be separated from their money.
   And that's me being charitable.

* Tim Wallace is the editor of Ecologic Media.  This article originally appeared at ecologicmedia.org