Bottled Water

Bottled water is ridiculous. People pay vast amounts of money for water which is generally of lower quality than tap water – especially if it comes in a throwaway plastic bottle and has been sitting there for more than a couple of months. Increasingly, high-end restaurants, especially in California, are abjuring bottled water in favor of their own on-site filtration systems. And in a sign of desperation, Evian, home of the world's worst website, has released something called the Palace bottle, complete with its own coaster, which apparently "brings a heightened level of luxury to fine dining occasions". With any luck, the writing is on the wall, and consumers will start appreciating bottled water for what it is: an utter waste of both carbon and money.

But what about places like China? Surely there, where tap water is known to be unsafe, one can justify the existence of bottle water? Actually, no. You know how Dasani and Aquafina are basically just rebranded tap water? Well, it turns out that in China, bottled water is literally rebranded tap water.

Up to half of the water used in water coolers across China's capital could be "fake", or not as pure as its manufacturers claim, state media said on Tuesday of the latest in a series of health scares...
Three years ago, a nationwide inspection on barrelled water found a 22 percent substandard rate. In the most serious case, 80 percent of barrelled water in the southern province of Jiangxi was reportedly not the real thing.

In much of the developing world, the rise of bottled water is invidious. The elites know that the tap water is dirty, so they start drinking bottled instead – and as a result, they have much less incentive to make the tap water clean. It's a bit like the crime rate in Mexico City or Johannesburg: if it gets so bad that the rich start hiring their own security guards and living behind razor wire, then at that point they've taken matters into their own hands and become less interested in working towards a broader societal solution to the crime problem.

So even though the Chinese elite are enraged by this news, in my eyes it's not all bad. In China, it seems, the only way to guarantee clean water for anybody is to guarantee clean water for everybody. And what's more, with any luck this news will keep demand for bottled water subdued. I'm hoping that by the time China becomes the world's dominant economic power, bottled water will be remembered as a 20th-Century curiosity, rather than a fact of life.