The world is drinking more bottled water all the time. According to researchers, the expansion of the bottled water market hides a huge failure.
The five-liter canister fills up in the blink of an eye.
Polar Spring has been packing water in Lake Urajärvi for twenty years. The water comes from a natural spring a couple of hundred meters away.
There are many types of bottled water. There is, for example, bottled spring water, tap water, flavored water, with and without bubbles. In this article, bottled water refers to packaged spring and tap water, to which no bubbles or flavors have been added.
There is now fierce competition in the world market for the sale of bottled water.
It’s no wonder. The market for bottled water has grown at a tremendous pace during the last decades and the growth will only continue. Bottled drinking water is sold around the world annually for about 270 billion dollars. It is estimated that more than a million bottles are sold every minute. The sales volume is expected to almost double by 2030.
First, the world market for bottled water hides a colossal failure. The fact that clean water is not available for everyone through reliable public water systems. This is what the researchers assessed in the report, which was published in March by the UN University’s research institute focused on water, environment and health.
In Finland, you can get clean drinking water directly from the tap. That’s why in rich countries like Finland, bottled water is a kind of luxury product – in many situations, you could do without it.
It’s different elsewhere. In many poorer countries, bottled water is a lifeline, the purchase of which may be the only way to obtain potable water. About 60 percent of bottled and packaged water is sold in the so-called global south, i.e. Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean – regions where developing and emerging economies are located.
– The problem is that packaged or bottled water consumes a really large part of poor people’s livelihood. This can keep them below the poverty line.
According to Takala, many studies have also speculated that the strong bottled water market may be an obstacle to the development of public water supply. When the elite get their drinking water from bottles, there is no political pressure to create a water supply available to all.
Takala describes bottled water in developing countries as a band-aid solution to the problem that people do not have access to clean water. According to UN estimates, about two billion people do not have access to safe and reliable drinking water and a sanitation system. This is also a big risk for health, because proper water supply plays a central role in the fight against various diseases.
– Of course, selling bottled water is also a really good business and there is a lot of lobbying for not even solving the problem in a long-term way, says Takala.
In Takala’s opinion, the situation is very frustrating, because long-term solutions for the development of a functioning water supply already exist. Besides, according to the researchers who wrote the UN report, it would also be much cheaper than buying bottled water.
Building a functioning water supply for those who do not currently have it would require an investment of only half the amount of what people now spend on buying bottled water.
According to Takala, using bottled water brought from elsewhere also does not encourage taking care of the local environment and its water sources.
The mountain of waste accumulated by water bottles is also large, and that has only grown over the years as the sale of bottled water has increased. According to a UN report, so much plastic waste accumulates every year that the amount is equivalent to the hose of 40-ton trucks from New York to Bangkok, Thailand.
In this regard, too, the situation in Finland is different from that in a large part of the world. Thanks to the deposit system, our plastic bottles are recycled. On a global level, it is rare. According to a UN report, up to 85 percent of plastic bottles end up as waste.
Urajärvi in \u200b\u200bPäijät-Häme is peaceful on a sunny spring day – after all, we are almost in the middle of nature. For Polar Spring’s Niilo Pellonmaa, spring water is a passion. He says he drinks it himself.
– Water is like wine. There are so many different qualities of that too.
Factory manager Kalle Rajakangas understands that there can be many different views on bottled water. For him, however, it’s not about a luxury product or a vanity. In Finland too, there is a need for prepackaged drinking water in many situations, he says. The company packs water for, for example, VR’s long-distance trains.
So bottled water has its own place – problems come into play when you look at the industry on a global level and what is hidden under the market.
Still, bottled water cannot be blamed for all the problems in the world’s water situation.
The most important of them is that the earth’s water consumption is not at a sustainable level. By far, most of people’s water consumption takes place in food production. Water is consumed, for example, for artificially irrigating farmland and pastures, and some of the water is wasted due to food waste.
Bottled water, however, encapsulates one of the questions of humanity’s destiny: Who gets drinkable water and at what price?
In the future, this question may become more and more difficult, as drought and heat periods increase with climate change and water shortages become more common.
*Professor Matti Kummu of Aalto University, who is familiar with global food and water issues, has also been interviewed for the story.*
*Do you drink bottled water yourself? You can discuss the topic until Monday 10.4. until 11 p.m.*