Wasteland and Council Pop: tracking the anti-bottled water zeitgeist 2010–11
When did we get the idea that without constant hydration we‘ll shrivel up and die?
(Suckers for bottled water, Tim Hayward, The Observer, 9th April 2010)
Tim Hayward’s exclamation was written in response to a tantrum he witnessed in a London museum, when a teenager howled at her mother for failing to buy her a bottled of water (amongst other crimes). The girl’s threat to swoon from dehydration prompted a blog from the food writer. In the teenager’s defence, maybe she was aware that her irritability was exacerbated by thirst. The odd drinking fountain has sprung up in London’s museums, but a free drinking water source is by no means guaranteed in any public building, except schools (as mentioned in the introduction, not compulsory) or in prisons.
In the Noughties, or 2000s, sightings of Londoners swigging bottled water on the Tube, at office desks or in local parks were commonplace, even banal. Some of the trendiest brands carried by teenagers as accessories masquerade as freshly bought bottles when they are in fact tap water refills. Re-using bought bottles is certainly not a practice confined to young people, but obviously someone has to purchase them in the first place. Finding bottled water is not a problem, anywhere. Corner shop fridges glisten with rows of them, usually with two to three brands to choose from. London’s cafés, from the most upmarket to greasy spoons are stocked to the gills with chilled water choices, whilst supermarkets invariably dedicate half an aisle, or even more, to bottled water options. Given that the latter comes unrefrigerated, those bottles are most likely to be bound for use at home, or possibly by more frugal bottled water consumers (who presumably plan their extra-domestic drinking water needs). Those who stockpile their water might be relieved to read that the bottles’ contents will remain fresh for more than a year. Fresh? The Natural Hydration Council helps by reminding consumers to ‘drink plenty’ of (bottled) water on behalf of its member brands: Highland Spring, Spa, Vittel and Volvic amongst other corporations.1 Cooperation between these competing brands must be deemed a worthwhile exercise within the U.K.’s lucrative hydration market.
Between 1993 and 2003, the bottled water market swelled from 570 million litres per annum to a staggering figure of over two billion litres.2 Consumption did not dip below the two billion mark during the twenty-first century’s first decade. That figure does not specify London’s gulp of that market but a combination of factors, such as climate, pollution, population and tourism, suggest that even 400 million litres would be a conservative estimate. This chapter investigates the impact of the resulting flow of plastic waste from discarded water bottles and the efforts of environmental campaigners to combat it by reducing demand.
In the belly of the MRF
For each bottle of water consumed, a container is disposed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, London’s recycling infrastructure was not as sophisticated as today’s material recovery industry but, recycled or not, those discarded bottles usually become someone else’s problem. For Jarno Stet, Westminster Council’s Waste Services Manager, the seasonal rise in plastic bottle waste from all cold beverages, including water, is a given. The stylish Dutchman, just 30 despite his prominent role in the world of waste, knows that water makes up a significant proportion of that plastic mountain. However, the figures are not precise because the plastic water bottles that do make it into the recycling stream are processed with other clear plastic soft drink containers. One quantity of waste that Stet can be more specific about is the London Marathon, naturally a large-scale water-guzzling affair. He candidly states of the Marathon’s five-tonne bottled water footprint: ‘They come in and trash the place and we clear it up; that’s the unfortunate thing about it.’3 Hosting the first London Marathon was a coup for Westminster in 1980, well before Stet’s time. No doubt the runners and spectators left litter, but certainly not on today’s scale. As we learned in the previous chapter, bottled water is highly unlikely to have been available then as an affordable product.
In the 21st century, Stet and his colleagues’ swift operation ensures that litter from such major events is invisible. Fortunately, advance planning for inevitable waste production ensures that these plastics do make it into the recycling stream. They are processed in one of two ‘materials recovery facilities’ that Westminster City Council contracts to deal with its recycling. Like water, the waste management industry has been transformed by European Union environmental policies. High landfill taxes now make recycling an economic imperative for local authorities.
Annually, 6,000 tonnes of potential recyclables from Westminster are sent to a materials recovery facility in Wandsworth, in the suburbs of southwest London.4 These recycling centres are known in the business as MRFs (pronounced ‘murph‘). This facility is one of ten across the capital that local authorities can use for large-scale recycling. A further 9,000 tonnes of waste is dispatched annually to a MRF in Greenwich.5 The Wandsworth MRF, in the industrial suburbs of southwest London, is run by Cory Environmental Services. Intriguingly on Smuggler’s Way, its Thames-side location facilitated the transportation of waste by river. Previously, as Stet explains, it was a ‘transfer station’ built by the Greater London Council. When landfill dominated, waste used to be loaded directly onto barges bound for Mucking Marshes near Tilbury in Essex. Nowadays, recovered materials are more likely to leave the depot in lorries. A common cargo departing from Wandsworth is a bale of plastic.
Inside the building, a soundproof door separates the reception area from the percussive din of the MRF’s enormous waste recovery machinery. On entry, an anteroom provides a gentle start for the uninitiated, though the scale of what lies ahead can be sensed through the sonic bleed into that space. A large conveyor belt runs through it at waist height and a few staff are positioned there to watch out for items to remove from the recyclables stream. Microwaves, for instance, are not uncommon in the flow of disposables. Around the corner, the cathedral-scale machinery is on display, where high-speed belts run at diagonal and horizontal angles. At the mouth of the machinery, a vast concrete pit receives cargo from recycling lorries of circa ten tonnes a load, creating a visual cacophony of waste. Its scale appears to reduce the recycling trucks to toys. Hovering above the pit, a crane arm lowers sporadically to grab two-tonne loads and transfers them to the first conveyor belt. How can the relatively delicate dimensions of a plastic bottle be discerned from this massive sea of waste?
Moving further into aisles of industrial machinery on metal walkways and staircases, the maze of sorting devices starts to reveal some order. 2D and 3D are separated by what look like rows of metal ‘teeth’. Cardboard is whipped off high into the air on one conveyor belt whilst another shoots drink bottles along to their next phase of sorting. That stage separates the mass of all bottles into different plastic categories with the aid of a machine programmed to read the mass of the objects, resulting in opaque milk containers being divided from Poly Ethylene Teraphthalate, or PET, soft drink bottles. Using an illuminated heat-reading sensor, on detecting a bottle’s mass, that bottle hops via a puff of air onto a separate chute. Bottle after bottle is picked out and ‘puffed’ away, as a variety of other objects run off the end of the belt and are discarded. But this is not all. As a green bottle approaches the end of the belt, another noise can be heard which signals the need to create a stronger air response: the green bottle is sent to a separate chute from the translucent bottles. The machine’s intelligence is not flawless. An operative monitoring its performance calmly pulls out a couple of odd slippers that made it into the clear plastic bottle stream.
All translucent drink bottles, including water, should theoretically make their way into a dedicated chute. The aim is to keep the PET stream uncontaminated so that a bale of clear, coloured or opaque plastic is produced. Depending on the season, the Wandsworth facility recovers between 14 and 28 bales of plastic per day. Weighing in at three tonnes, a PET bale can fetch up to £2000 on the open market. Less transparent is who pays these prices for recycled plastic, or where the bales are destined for after Wandsworth. Westminster’s recyclables become the property of Cory Environmental Services once they enter its facility and that private company is not bound to reveal its list of PET clients.
A 2008 research report published by the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), instigated to measure the CO2 impact of exporting recycled paper and plastic bottles abroad, stressed the recent growth of the market: ‘In 2007…half a million tonnes of recovered plastics were exported. The principal destination for these exports was China.’6 The Government agency WRAP concluded that the practice of shipping containers of plastic bales to China was environmentally sustainable on the basis of the CO2 emissions that it calculated at that time, however the system of cost and profits from plastic recycling between the public and private sectors seems ethically dubious.7 More positively, a local client for PET bales that Jarno Stet highlights is Dagenham’s Closed Loop Recycling centre on the periphery of East London. At that centre, another phase of recycling produces re-usable plastic for either new drink bottles or other forms of food packaging. The centre proudly claims on its website to be the U.K.’s first ‘food-grade plastics recycler’.8
These glimpses of the world of waste management — often out of our sight in industrial estates on the city’s fringes — reveal well-oiled businesses; ones that are part of a sector valued at over £11 billion in the United Kingdom (2011).9 Certainly, many jobs are created by the waste industry but the notion that the polluter pays, in the case of products such as bottled water, is far from established. Most plastic water bottles do not make it into the recycling stream at all. Stet demonstrated this fact by an experimental survey of plastic bottle waste in a selection of Westminster’s bins on a hot July day.
Donning a pair of a member of his team’s gloves, he sorted through Piccadilly Circus’s bins after a single morning of waste disposal. As a passionate advocate of recycling, for him it was a sobering confrontation with the items that will never make it into the recycling stream. This is ‘contaminated’ waste, in which plastic bottles mix with the dregs from disposable coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches, for instance. Such waste, at least in Westminster, is no longer bound for landfill. Stet puts this waste policy in a nutshell: ‘Throwing it into a hole in the ground is just silly because it sits there and doesn’t do anything.’ He is a subscriber to the philosophy of waste-as-resource. Instead of land-filling, all of Westminster’s contaminated waste is burnt in a high-tech ‘Energy from Waste’ facility. The excess power produced is sold to the National Grid.
Even so, the human labour involved in clearing up and transporting these materials, and the carbon footprint generated in the process, is significant. Westminster City Council subcontracts the recruitment and management of its waste collection and recycling to the multinational company Veolia. 500 people are employed in Westminster’s waste and recycling operation alone. Two of these operatives, who usually start work at 4.30am, assist Stet with his experiment in their Chinatown depot. They pile the would-be recyclables into neat mounds of plastic, paper and cardboard. Apart from his gloves, Stet looks incongruous performing this whiffy task in neatly pressed suit trousers and a crisp, stripy shirt. He appears dismayed by the results. Not one bag is devoid of plastic water bottles. In fact, they dominate the other soft drinks type by three to one. From six bags, more than thirty water bottles are extracted and that is only one morning of consumption, in one small patch of the capital. Multiply this average of four-to-six bottles per bin by the 2,000 waste receptacles on Westminster’s streets (give or take a few), and the figure for a morning’s contaminated water bottle waste is upwards of 8,000 bottles. Given the climbing temperatures on the hot July morning of the experiment, the figure is bound to be higher than on a drizzly February morning, but it remains alarming. Strikingly, a plethora of water brands were represented in the extracted bottles, testifying to the fact that for those who passed through Piccadilly Circus, on that morning at least, there was no favoured water tipple. Brand choice seemed arbitrary and therefore it suggests that drinkers are more concerned with the bottles’ contents rather than the claims printed on the plastic strip glued around their middles. Some of the bottles reveal that only a few swigs were taken before they were discarded. Schweppes Abbey Well is one brand that was recovered from the general waste stream. This was London’s ‘official water’ for the 2012 Olympic Games, an event purported to be a bastion of sustainable innovation.
The Cause
Post-Millennium, as climate change became a mainstream topic of debate, bottled water arose as a campaign focus in the agendas of some London-based environmental campaigners. Sustain was one of the first organisations to target bottled water consumption as an environmental problem from its ‘better food and farming’ perspective.10 The charity has an umbrella membership working nationally but is London-based. As a food product, bottled water fell under its remit. Sustain published a report in 2006 entitled Have You Bottled It? How drinking tap water can help save you and the planet. The publication’s author undermined a notion that was central to mineral and spring water consumers from Queen Elizabeth I to 1980s Yuppies: that bottled water was a health product. By querying the virtues of twenty-first century plastic packaging, in terms of the chemicals involved in its production and the uncertainty over whether those could leach into the water, or even absorb external toxins, the rows of bottled water illustrating the report take on a more sinister hue. Chemical leaching from plastic is a common health concern on many American websites that question the merits of bottled water, but little conclusive evidence exists to prove that the substance in question —‘bisphenol a’ — is a health risk.11 Sustain’s anti-bottled water stance, however, is more firmly planted in the concept of water miles: ‘The concept of food miles, and the environmental damage they cause is now well-established but bottled water can also travel all around the world before we drink it.’12 This voyage certainly does not promote the notion of bottled water’s freshness in comparison to tap water. Most importantly for the report’s authors, choosing to drink tap over bottled water fulfils the ultimate goal of the internationally accepted priority of the ‘waste hierarchy’, ideally to reduce rather than recycle or reuse.
In 2007, after Sustain’s report was published, an entrepreneur contacted Waste Watch’s Maria Andrews about his Hydrachill product, a tap water vending machine.13 Waste Watch was situated in Shoreditch just down the hill from Sustain’s Islington offices. As a plastics expert, Nick Davies might have seemed an unlikely ally to Waste Watch, however he had designed a bottle specifically with tap-water-refilling in mind. His bottle tackled a flaw in the mouthpieces of other refillable bottle designs which were a choking hazard for some user groups. However, it was not the bottle but how it could be refilled that caused Nick Davies to contact Waste Watch. He had recently convinced Water UK to have a prototype of his ‘Hydrachill’ vending machine installed at its headquarters. The Hydrachill mirrors the design aesthetic and proportions of a common soft drinks vending unit, yet it plugs into a mains water supply to ‘vend’ filtered drinking water. When Maria Andrews heard about the tap water vending machine, she was hooked: ‘You can talk about recycling, you can talk about re-use but the word reduce is really hard [to show].’ As 2007 progressed, Waste Watch collaborated with Hydrachill, Water UK and Thames Water to promote the installation of ten trial vending machines in public spaces, funded by the latter. The project managers besieged London’s local authorities with presentations about how Hydrachills could reduce waste. One organisation was pinpointed strategically as the most attractive, high profile partner for hosting the trial units: London Underground. Given the annual posters that appear in Tube stations during hot summers advising the public to carry bottled water, the proposal seemed to match a gap in Transport for London’s service. Curiously, the organisation was not cooperative. Maria Andrews explained in March 2010 that, in her experience, ‘if you try and talk to Transport for London which we‘ve done on a number of different occasions, they asked us to do a feasibility study on where their water mains are — they were saying it would cost us 50k to go and find where the water access is’. Rather than see the proposal as an opportunity, Andrews felt that Hydrachill was treated as any other commercial marketing proposal or sales venture: ‘If I was a franchise, say I was Burger King, I would have Transport for London running around after me.’ What further frustrated Andrews was that the Greater London Authority’s collaboration with Thames Water for the London on Tap promotion campaign should surely have compelled its transport department to engage with a prominent Mayoral strategy: Ken Livingstone’s, at that time. The Hydrachill sales team managed to secure two sites in Hammersmith Bus Station, with some sign of a willing Transport for London outpost, and the Museum of London. However, the planned October 2009 launch was stalled when the Chief Executive Officer at Thames Water changed. Hydrachill was not infecting everyone with the same enthusiasm as its promoters.
Aspects of Hydrachill might not persuade ardent environmentalists, let alone Transport for London officials, whose job description does not stretch to facilitating tap water promotion projects. Visually, the vending machine unit is not elegant. The advertising hoarding façades may attract users through scale and strident colours, however the unit’s dimensions seem to exceed its main functions of cooling and serving piped water. A third function of dispensing branded refill bottles is one defence of a larger bulk for storage, but it is the aesthetic of vending as a design concept that seems an uneasy counterpoint to the commodification of drinking water. There is another reason for the vending likeness: Hydrachill’s promoters proposed that a charge of 20 pence per refill would fund the project’s continuation. For Sustain employee Christine Haigh, this sent out a confused message about the pro-tap water zeitgeist amongst environmentalists, about which she was blunt: ‘Either it is free, or it is not.’14
Ideologically similar voluntary organisations can rapidly dissociate themselves from each other on the question of how best to achieve their goals. By design, Hydrachill importantly addressed the public space provision issue, albeit with the need for shelter and electricity. Sustain raised the spatial aspect of bottled water demand in its 2008 publication, The Taps Are Turning: ‘Streets, parks, bus and train stations, museums and galleries, for example are woefully poorly served with public drinking fountains. Given how difficult it is to get access to the public water supply in public places, it is small wonder that people have opted to carry bottles of water with them.’15
The report’s seemingly innocuous list of spaces in reality throws open a breadth of categories and reveals the complexities inherent in proposing where or by what means public water might flow freely. Another issue that the report raised also plays an important role in the tap versus bottled water equation in public life: political will. Sustain’s report patted Ken Livingstone on the back for his administration’s discouragement of bottled water provision at meetings. In 2008, his tap water commitment became patently high profile when the Greater London Authority collaborated with Thames Water. London on Tap was born. It was a campaign, the like of which had not been mounted since the post-privatisation years to market the capital’s tap water.
Tarting up the Tap
London on Tap was launched in February 2008, with a specific remit ‘to promote tap water in London’s restaurants, cafés and pubs’.16 The campaign’s first press release was timed to coincide with the BBC’s broadcast of a Panorama programme provocatively entitled, Bottled Water: Who Needs It? Journalist Tim Heap’s investigative piece on the global bottled water industry presented stark images of environmental devastation, such as the carcass of a bird on a Dorset beach whose stomach showed that it had ingested ‘nurdles’. These minute particles of plastic waste represented the environmental pollution caused by plastics generally, including disposable water, and other drink, bottles. The film, coupled with the London on Tap campaign, signalled that the anti-bottled water zeitgeist was not confined to environmental activists on the fringe, but that it was an issue endorsed by the water industry itself, the BBC and the Mayor of London. Anti-bottled-water activism had gone mainstream.17
From the outset, London on Tap was openly anti-bottled-water, with supporters such as the Green Party in Livingstone’s cohort at City Hall. The campaign focused on the message of de-stigma-tising requests for tap water in London’s restaurants. As Livingstone was quoted: ‘My message is very simple: don’t be embarrassed to ask for tap water when you eat out. You will save money and help save the planet.’18 Thames Water adopted the quality assurance stance, when the company’s then Chief Executive, David Owens, stated: ‘Luckily in London we have probably the best drinking water in the world…in a recent independent taste test rated higher than 20, more expensive, bottled brands.’19 He may well have been referring to Waste Watch’s ‘Tap Water Challenge’, from which Maria Andrews reported that 90% of tasters could not distinguish between bottled and tap water (apparently the secret was to chill the water).
Designer bottled water emperor’s-new-clothes effect was alluded to in London on Tap’s competition for an ‘iconic carafe’ to turn diners on to tap water. The competition was judged by a high profile panel, including the Crafts Council’s director Rosy Greenlees, architect Zaha Hadid and the environmentalist Tony Juniper. By the time the competition’s winning design was announced, in December 2008, Boris Johnson had been elected Mayor of London. Despite party political differences, Johnson picked up where Livingstone had left off. In fact, his enthusiasm for tap water soon became as renowned as his love of the bicycle. Announcing the winning carafe design, the Mayor commented: ‘Many congratulations to Neil Barron, who has created Tap Top, a top-notch water carafe for London. I am sure it will be snapped up by businesses and organisations across the capital in order to make tap water an easier choice. At a time when we are all tightening our belts, choosing tap water over bottled water makes more sense than ever, whilst also helping people to cut their carbon footprint.’20 Visually, the industrial designer’s winning carafe mimicked the familiar contours of a standard kitchen tap, but with dimensions stretched to the scale of a wine bottle. Like the top of the tap that one habitually turns, the carafe’s neck has four ridges to grip, suggesting this familiar ‘tap top’ aesthetic whilst performing the more functional role of trapping ice in the carafe. With a choice of clear, bottle green or topaz-like blue, the carafe’s elegant design might have enticed even the finest of the capital’s restaurants to buy into the London on Tap campaign.
However, the plan for the carafe to become as common a sight on restaurant tables as the tap in one’s kitchen has not transpired. Resources lavished on the initial campaign were perhaps not sustained for the project management of the ambitious scheme’s next phase. Media partner to the campaign, the Evening Standard only covered the launch and the winner’s announcement despite the fact that its editorial position is now firmly in the anti-bottled water camp. Perhaps there was no more news to relay about the 10,000 carafes that were released to infect restauranteurs’ enthusiasm. The only eatery London on Tap parades its association with in press releases is the celebrity chef Aldo Zilli’s chain (Zilli also happened to be one of the judges). One reason for the reluctant uptake could be that restaurants which encourage tap water consumption already have their own jugs, so they are consequently not willing to pay £120 for a box of designer carafes.21
Given the economic climate at the end of the Noughties first decade, restaurant owners would have to be pretty ardent environmentalists to both invest in the carafes and actively dissuade customers from buying bottled water. The product is by no means a benign profit issue. It is true that many of London’s trendiest eateries do earnestly advocate tap water as a more ethical and sustainable food culture has taken root in recent times. For instance, Emma Reynolds, the dynamic young manager of a successful trio of sushi restaurants prides herself on the company’s commitment to source fish from only avowedly sustainable sources. The same sensibility led to her trialling the second branch of Tsuru, when it first opened, as a bottled-water-free eatery. Many customers did not take to the lack of drinking water choice. Consequently, Reynolds now ensures that chilled tap water is always available to customers, but only as an alternative to the ubiquitous fridge stocked with bottled water. Some figures she quotes reveal why many businesses might not be so keen to push the tap over the bottle: ‘We pay 30p for a 500ml bottle of water, charge £1 and pay 20% V.A.T. on the sale, so we make 50p per bottle.’22 It is a persuasive profit margin for businesses weighing up environmental sustainability commitments, green kudos and consumer desires.23
Twenty-first century philanthropy
The environmental zeitgeist in the restaurant industry that London on Tap hoped to connect with bubbled up elsewhere in 2009: outdoors, in Hyde Park’s grade-one-listed environs. A local jogger noticed the world famous park’s lack of hydration facilities. That jogger also happened to be a property developer involved in the largest regeneration project in central London in the late Noughties: King’s Cross. Michael Freeman was also a trustee of the charitable foundation associated with the Royal Parks. When he proposed bestowing a gift for his neighbourhood park, the idea of a drinking fountain arose. Sara Lom, the Royal Parks Foundation’s Chief Executive, recalls how she was cautious about matching the gift with the needs of Hyde Park’s users and managers. Following consultation with the park’s management, the project was welcomed as a public service and as a means of tackling the vast volume of plastic waste from water bottles discarded in the park. Ensuring the gift’s actual benefit to park users and managers was dependent on an appropriate location. The chosen spot near Cumberland Gate, at the Marble Arch end of the park was identified as a place where the paths of riders, runners and walkers intersected. A small plaque not far from where the new fountain would be installed marked the spot where an ostentatious nineteenth-century drinking fountain — sponsored by the Maharajah of Vizianagram — once stood.24 Like the Maharajah’s offering to the Royal Park, this object would also be a unique artwork, though with a more muted aesthetic sensibility.
Freeman Family Fountain, Hyde Park, 2010. Author’s own photograph.
Sculptor David Harber translated Michael Freeman’s £30,000 donation into a globe of mirror-polished, marine-grade stainless steel.25 At 1.2 metres in diameter, the shiny plinth-mounted object is visible from a distance to approaching joggers.26 If one stands close by, a runner’s laboured breathing can be heard as she or he runs on the spot whilst sipping from the fountain, even steaming up its mirrored surfaces on wintry days. At close quarters, Harber’s nod to the hydrological cycle can be appreciated in the subtle shades of the fountain’s bluey-green petals. During the sculpture’s creation, the Royal Parks Foundation’s consultation also involved working with young people from nearby St Vincent’s Primary School who, as Sara Lom enthusiastically recounts worked on ‘a project about why plastic bottles were bad and what they would want to see in a fountain’. Their ideas were fed back to David Harber, so it is no coincidence that young users of the fountain today can be observed benefitting from the design’s three drinking spouts positioned at various heights. A fourth bottle-refilling spout is a notably twenty-first century design feature. The fountain’s unveiling in September 2009 signalled the start of a London fountain renaissance, at least an outdoor one, when it was heralded as the first new drinking fountain to grace the Royal Parks in thirty years.27
Whilst the finishing touches were being put to the Hyde Park fountain, Sustain began a project to translate its tap versus bottled water polemic into activism. Coincidentally, the initiative was focused on parks and fountains. Off a side street, near the bustle of Angel Tube in central London, the two women behind the Children’s Food Campaign (CFC), at the charity Sustain, operate from an office densely packed with environmentalists. Their core campaign is to counteract the damaging effects of junk food mass-marketing targeted at young people and to secure better ‘real food education in every school’. Jackie Schneider’s and Christine Haigh’s part-time posts are funded by the British Heart Foundation (at the time of the interview, in 2010). Their time is tight and the task is mammoth. Sustain’s research on bottled water and the public space connection resonated with Schneider, also a primary school teacher. Fountains are a familiar topic amongst her pupils: ‘Most schools aren’t equipped for the whole class to have drinking water at once. Children get quite stroppy about that if they’ve forgotten their water bottle or drunk it all at playtime and they can’t refill it. They are actually quite keen to drink water when they’re thirsty.’ All schools have fountains (often donated), however Schneider explains that the problem is the quantity. A lack of sufficient fountains is a common complaint voiced by student councils nationally. From a health perspective, the case for promoting drinking water as an alternative to sugary drinks was an obvious link for the CFC but Jackie Schneider underlines how it is also a crucial issue in the battle against childhood obesity: ‘Young people can be confused that their body is telling them they are thirsty and they mistake it for hunger.’ Water UK agree that obesity, diabetes, and some cancers, such as urinary tract, could be avoided later in life by children having better access to hydration and education about why it is important.28
When the bottled water issue became a prominent focus for Sustain, the CFC managers saw an opportunity to connect the public-space-water-access-deficit with children’s play spaces (outside the context of schools). In summer 2009, they mounted a national census of park fountains. As predicted by the activists, the results were poor. One hundred and fifty responses were tallied, but only fifteen parks with drinking fountains were recorded and some of those had more than one fountain.29 Desiccated civic fountains are a common trope of British parks, usually designed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Out of the fifteen parks in the survey results, thirteen working drinking fountains were recorded. Though the research was conducted across the U.K. (fountains stretching from Ashford to Wolverhampton were tallied), ten of the fifteen parks with fountains identified were in London. A mere nine were reported to be functional.30
Sustain’s Thirsty Play report acknowledged that the results represented approximately a three per cent sample of the nation. An on-line message board associated with the campaign was overwhelmingly supportive, however concerns about vandalism and ‘dog poo’ contamination did surface. With limited personnel and time, they hoped the project would add to the momentum of other environmental groups tackling the bottled water problem and London on Tap. Christine Haigh further explained their philosophy: ‘We could go down to the level of a national campaign and try to get a law that says every park must have a fountain but frankly we don’t think that’s the road to go down.’ These campaigners prefer a democratic, bottom-up approach to the issue.
Parallel to Sustain’s foray into park landscapes, a fresh-faced drinking fountain enthusiast was on his bike mapping London’s drinking fountains. Like the CFC’s results, he found that most of them were in a state of dereliction. Guy Jeremiah was a successful environmental consultant; that is until he became an anti-bottled-water zealot (easily done). As he recalls in summer 2011, a couple of years previously he was about to board a train in London to his hometown of Sheffield, when he realised that the only drinking water he could access was from a shop — in an expensive, environmentally unfriendly package. Mentioning this experience to his mother, she retorted ‘“Why don’t you do what your dad does!”’ It turned out that Dad simply refilled a used bottle from the home tap on his excursions. Jeremiah was not satisfied with this solution. One hung-over day in May 2008 he was lolling with friends on London’s Primrose Hill and the thought of the tap water refilling came back to him (dehydration can induce such drinking water fantasies). After sketching the ‘squashy thing’ he was imagining, one friend was immediately impressed with his mock up. That friend is still a shareholder in what became a new product and a company: Aquatina (now rebranded ‘ohyo’). Jeremiah’s inner designer was on the loose.32
Aquatina is a collapsible plastic bottle, intended to be as portable as keys or a mobile phone. The accordion-like bottles come in an array of bold pink, blue and green shades but the product took a long time to translate from his foggy-headed sketch to a mass-produced object that can be purchased in a couple of clicks online. Jeremiah brought his sketch to a product design firm in Sheffield, where it was translated into a 3D version that fulfils his collapsible vision whilst materially withstanding any possibility of chemical leaching. Moulded from ‘category four’ plastic, the Aquatina can claim to be free of any trace of the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) potentially associated with negative health effects from long-term plastic degradation. This environmental professional was not content with ‘marketing Tupperware’, as he puts it. He also wanted to tackle the public space facet of where such a vessel could be refilled with water, for free.
Jeremiah explains how he set about the fountain search with his colleague: ‘Paul in a crazy fashion did a Freedom of Information request to every council in the country, pestered them all and some came back really enthusiastically and gave us all these rough locations of fountains. Most bizarrely did, so we mapped them all.’ This spatial plotting, on the ground in London, was done with the aid of Google Maps and the same software was used to put together a crude website. Find-A-Fountain was born. Jeremiah is aware that his fountain promotion might seem too green to be true: ‘Cynically people can look at this and think Find-A-Fountain is just a PR campaign. I hope it does raise PR but at the same time with the amount of effort we put into Find-A-Fountain. If I was a hard-nosed businessman it would be, forget that: put all the money into marketing Tupperware.’ At sales of over 60,000 Aquatina bottles (as of September 2011) and purchases from major retailers, such as Robert Dyas, the marketing end of things is going well though Jeremiah is adamant that many more need to be sold for the operation to stay afloat. The refill market is getting crowded. One competitor particularly irks Jeremiah. The Water Bobble pipped the Aquatina to the post for supplying London’s Science Museum shop. Apart from a loss of sales, and the product’s American origin, Jeremiah disapproves of its unique-selling-point: a built-in filter: ‘What are they filtering?’ In his mind, those in the business of advocating tap water refilling should not be raising doubts about quality, because ‘they’re giving the impression to those who go into the Science Museum that for London’s water to be safe, you have to filter it’. Jeremiah might be comforted to learn that the only bottle presently on sale in the Museum’s shop is not the Water Bobble but a designer glass refill model that is starkly devoid of any brand name or filtering apparatus.31
Jeremiah does not mention the embodied energy in the production of his plastic product but Aquatina’s website does state: ‘Refill your Aquatina just three times and it’s carbon neutral compared to buying bottles.’ For those consumers in the habit of buying disposable bottles and not reusing them for fear of leaching, the product is a better option. Jeremiah is evidently passionate about improving access to free tap water in London and beyond. Aquatina’s presence at the Prince of Wales ‘Start’ sustainable living garden party attracted the interest of the Garfield Foundation and Charles himself is said to have declared the design to be ‘“genius”’.
Find-A-Fountain now has a sophisticated website on which an interactive map of all the working, and dry, fountains Jeremiah and his colleagues located appear. Anyone can send in details of a fountain they find; whether outdoor, indoor or defunct. No map of London’s drinking fountains has been published since the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association issued maps attached to its annual reports in the 1870s, but they were soon suspended as an extravagance when funds were running low. It is apt, therefore, that the same organisation in its contemporary guise — The Drinking Fountain Association — is working in partnership with Aquatina’s founder on this contemporary mapping project that takes full advantage of the digital age and locative media.
“Refill on Tap”33
A new fountain, which appeared on Find-A-Fountain’s radar in 2010, became the darling of the tap water refill market. This would be no bombastic Victorian-style restoration but a suitably twenty-first century civic amenity. Victor Callister, the Street Scene Manager for The City of London Corporation, was keen for sustainability policies to be transposed from the comfort of digital files to the messier realities on the ground. The edges of Callister’s Mancunian accent may have been softened during twenty years down south, but he is hard on the waste issue: ‘We don’t have many litterbins in the City [an anti-terrorism measure]. There’s a lot of street waste…so in the general cleansing there are high volumes of bottle waste. It seems unnecessary that people are buying bottled water and not refilling their bottles.’34 He issues this statement within an elegant glass-fronted boardroom, which forms a contemporary façade to the medieval Guildhall complex. Nestled in one of the world’s most historically resonant spaces of global finance, his anti-bottled water stance comes as a surprise. Despite his distaste for plastic litter, Callister explains that the new fountain design will embrace the use of bottles, as long as they are re-usable: ‘We think it’s more about topping up bottles rather than drinking from the jet fountain.’ Despite the project’s small material scale, the human resources being poured into its production are evident from the account of its production that Callister shares.
With highly qualified urban designers and architects in situ, the Corporation’s planners are usually in a luxurious position (the economic climate have already changed that). Part of the planner’s job is to observe and respond to changes in the use of urban space. Victor Callister explains the significance of the chosen site for the pilot fountain: ‘When I started to work in the City, it was a business city. It closed down in the evening, it closed down at the weekend and it was really only people coming in to do maintenance work on buildings. There was no retail because there was no business then. That’s fundamentally shifted. You come around St Paul’s at the weekend and it’s one of the busiest places in central London.’ These new residential and transient tourist populations form new publics. They consume and they make waste. One location where the City’s diverse groups of workers, residents and visitors intersect is in the outdoor space of Carter Lane Gardens.
From a bird’s eye view of St Paul’s Cathedral, Carter Lane Gardens is a slice of pedestrianised breathing space sandwiched between the road running along the south of the church and the Thames. The semi-circular little plaza-cum-garden has planted beds and benches dotted around it. Tourists, office workers, construction labourers and local school children alike all take breathers from their exertions there. Standing in the garden’s centre and tilting one’s head up to the right, the full height of the Cathedral looms, whilst to the left the Millennium Bridge’s dramatic walkway shoots across the Thames to the feet of the Tate Modern. Pedestrians moving from the mammoth contemporary art gallery to one of London’s première heritage tourism draws can pause in the tranquil space of the landscaped garden before entering the City proper. Here, the minor architectural wonder of the new drinking fountain lies.
Just before eleven on the scorching morning of 21st May 2010, a modest group of circa thirty people gather to launch Refill on Tap. Standing at just over a metre high, the polished cast iron rectangular slab of the fountain forms a sleek, elegant casing for the single water pipe out of which a sturdy, gleaming brass spout protrudes. Its Spanish designers, Santa and Cole, state that their concept for Atlántida –an off-the-shelf landscape architecture accessory –was to break ‘with the classic design of an ornamental fountain’.35 The only other feature is a grate in the ground for an essential function, which is drainage. Drinking directly from the fountain’s brass spout would require a feat of acrobatics. It points firmly, almost stubbornly, downwards.
For the launch, a temporary street sign is in place to the side of the fountain, announcing: ‘This is London’s first fully approved drinking fountain in thirty years.’36 Given that the Hyde Park fountain was the only other high-profile public fountain project in London at this point, it is hard not to interpret the statement as a slight to that project’s integrity (green kudos a much-sought after accolade). The acronym WRAS, standing for Water Regulations Advisory Scheme, is emblazoned on the sign. This stamp of approval certifies that the plumbing fittings encased in the cast iron slab, and the spout’s design, protect both the health of its users and the wider water supply from contamination. Approval also encompasses the design’s prevention of water waste. Santa and Cole’s Atlántida had to be adapted for The City of London Corporation to meet these precise regulations. Callister is very clear that the fountain being shut down as a public health hazard would not look good and the fountain project officer, Henry Smith, looks harassed by remembering the lengthy process of securing the WRAS stamp of approval.
At the launch, Smith and his colleagues appear to be letting off steam. Ties are loosened and the team enthusiastically doles out custom-designed refill bottles to passersby, some of whom linger momentarily to see why such a fuss is being made about a visually underwhelming object. A compass is even embossed in the necks of the refill bottles (for lost tourists?).
The launch’s atmosphere is convivially filled with animated chatter, until the hubbub is broken by the crackle of an amplified voice. That voice belongs to Bob Duffield, the charismatic Chairman (2010) of the City of London’s Port Health and Environmental Service Committee. He issues the necessary acknowledgements to the regulatory bodies involved before launching into a passionate, political speech about the environmental cost of bottled water. Everyone seems hooked as he momentarily transforms Carter’s Lane gardens into his own Speaker’s Corner. Those lolling on benches languidly with their bottles of Evian perhaps had not banked on a late-morning snack of polemic. Firstly, Duffield outs himself as a hydrophile but the real meat comes as he states: ‘There is no contest when it comes to cost. Tap water at two-tenths of a pence per litre is a hundred and forty-one times cheaper than the best-selling mineral water, which is Evian, and which, even if you buy it in a supermarket, costs over thirty pence a litre. Civil society begins and ends with effective plumbing and we should remember clean water on tap represented a quantum leap in human history and it is a tragedy that so many people in the world are remaining without clean running water.’37 Duffield is an anthropologist by training, which goes some way to explaining his humanitarian stance on the subject. He makes it apparent why he believes the modest installation is, in fact, a seriously political move. Evidently not a shareholder in Evian, he reminds those gathered that a cargo of this brand, on a truck from Lake Geneva to Edinburgh uses ‘15.77 gallons of diesel and emits 350 pounds of carbon dioxide’. As buses and cars pass in a steady stream on Carter Lane and the air is thick with heat, the taste of carbon emissions is tangible.
Moments after Bob Duffield’s speech concludes, runners from the City of London’s marathon team canter over to hydrate and a queue forms at the fountain. Its slight proportions are overshadowed by the bustling milieu of planning department and environmental health officers who enthusiastically chat about their role in providing this alternative to bottled water in the City.
This fountain does pose an alternative to the notion that the surrounding shops, cafes and supermarkets should be profiting from the commodification of drinking water. As the launch crowd dissipates, a Water Delivery Company vehicle turns down an adjacent street and pulls up beside an office block. The company’s cargo contains ‘Spring Water and Water Coolers for your Office or Home‘; a timely reminder of the powerful water culture the City planners are up against.38 Presumably the modern office building has plenty of taps inside its premises, but this vehicle suggests that plain old London tap water does not meet workers’ hydration tastes. This is somewhat ironic, given that many water cooler suppliers merely re-package tap water. Across the park from my own home in East London, tucked behind a corrugated fence under a railway arch, one such bottling plant busily fills up water cooler products with a filtered version of tap water. A peek behind the fence reveals the operation’s convoluted apparatus, presumably for the removal of lime from London’s naturally hard water (understandable), but no underground spring or mineral water source is being tapped under this semi-industrial cavern. I doubt this semi-industrial location is the provenance imagined by the people who drink from their office water coolers. The lucrative market for office water, some twenty years from when it was established, suggests it is now a cultural norm for offices to provide chilled water despite the environmental or financial cost and the availability of tap water from kitchens. In some settings, consciousness about the dubious merits of water coolers ensures the success of ‘ethical’ brands, such as AquAid. A portion of its profit is donated to countries with poor water infrastructure. AquAid, in partnership with Christian Aid, even strives to encourage existing clients who purchase coolers filled with spring water to consider moving to their more environmentally sound mains-fed systems.39 As morally enticing as this company’s agenda may sound, it still boasts a range of six different water cooler products, which is not exactly environmentally kind.40 Combining corporate water profits with environmental and social ethics is a dicey public relations business.
Olympic Hydration
Tensions between contemporary urban sustainability agendas, modern consumer desires and the role of corporate sponsorship were blatantly displayed in London’s plans for the Olympic Games. London Mayor Boris Johnson proclaimed his enthusiasm for public fountains back in 2010 when the Freeman Family Fountain was launched: ‘I applaud the arrival of a super stylish new public drinking fountain in Hyde Park. …I am a massive fan of drinking fountains and we are currently considering other ways of encouraging better access to tap water including drinking fountains.’41 As the Greater London Authority was one of the main public agency drivers of the Olympic Delivery Authority, one imagines that the high sustainability claims for the Games encompassed a free drinking water vision.
Published in 2009, the London 2012 Sustainability Plan Towards A One Planet 2012 mentioned only one drinking water goal: ‘To reduce the amount of drinking water used in the Olympic Village homes by 35 per cent.’42 The publication also stated that ‘games-time water management policies will be developed by LOCOG as part of the venue operational management plans’.43 Initial discussion about water in the sustainability agenda was entirely couched in the rhetoric of water stress. Therefore, the fact that the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) was in receipt of major sponsorship from Coca-Cola could remain comfortably off the sustainability agenda until the event’s operational phase began. A minor reference in the 2009 policy document briefly raised the issue of food packaging waste, including drink bottles as a recycling concern.44 In the 103-page document, the word plastic appeared only twice, and that was in relation to construction materials. These omissions are rather disingenuous from a sustainability perspective, given that Coca-Cola Great Britain launched its new branding for the 2012 Olympics in March 2009.45 As we saw from the brief forage through Westminster’s bins, that very brand, Schweppes Abbey Well, is already in circulation. Coca-Cola’s stake in the Games had not escaped the attention of Jenny Jones, Assembly Member of the Greater London Authority for the Green Party.
In a 2009 London Assembly session where LOCOG presented an update about its planning, Jenny Jones was first off the starting blocks: ‘What are the requirements of Coca-Cola and McDonalds in relation to the catering arrangements at Games’ venues?’46 LOCOG’s Chief Executive Officer, Paul Deighton, responded: ‘[Coca-Cola’s] right is to be the exclusive supplier of non-alcoholic beverages in the Park….Coca-Cola, of course, has a wide range of products…also juices and water. The second thing I will just say to you is we have already committed to providing free drinking water in each of the venues as well.’47 Jones pressed Deighton further, ‘So can people bring in their own water, for example?’ His rejoinder: ‘Yes. Absolutely.’ Perhaps it was planned by London 2012, but drinking water’s first prominent mention in its published documents appeared in a press release about catering plans, coincidentally a couple of months after this very meeting: ‘LOCOG has confirmed that free drinking water will be made available at all Games venues.’48 Whilst LOCOG’s commitment to a free drinking water offer, as the event delivery arm of London 2012, could be seen as commendable, this provision is stipulated as important for all public events by the U.K.’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE).49 It is not really a choice in an event of the Olympics’ profile. For every 3,000 people, one water outlet is advised by the HSE. Such licensing guidelines are well known by one of the designers of the Olympic Stadium.
Architect Megan Ashfield, of the architectural practice Populous, is softly spoken, but the strength of her passion about designing sports stadia is clear. She a strong advocate for embedding sustainable principles in the design of stadia but yet she is more than aware of the challenges this building typology presents. As one of the designers for the Sydney Green Games’ ANZ Stadium, Populous experimented with alternative water systems: ‘We actually used the roof as a water gathering and water harvesting device.’50 Sydney’s grey-water harvest was employed for both sanitation (flushing toilets) and pitch irrigation. For London 2012, she is a chief architect for the main stadium, or ‘the world’s biggest stage’, as she calls the building. Thus far, the sustainability focus for its construction had been on ensuring that the embodied energy in the production and transportation of materials for the Stadium was kept to a minimum. Existing gas pipes, for instance, were used as structural components rather than freshly manufactured custom elements. With a circumference of almost a kilometre, the ‘giant bicycle wheel on its side’, as Ashfield describes the design, must reflect the project motto conceived by the architects, ‘embrace the temporary’. London’s challenge of scaling capacity up for the Olympics to 80,000 and back down to a minimum of 25,000 afterwards made the Meccano set concept for the building appropriate, as a skeleton that could be fleshed out as required. Some design elements in this skeleton were essential to its final use, such as toilets, however the architect explains that ‘drinking water is one of those factors which can go either way’.
It is evident that Ashfield is ambivalent about the merits of drinking fountains, in sport stadia anyway. One reason is the intermittent use of the stadium as a building typology. She explains that ‘unlike any other building type, they only open for a certain number of days per year. The average is about 26 days per year’. This fact makes Ashfield concerned about water stagnating in pipe-work when the building is not in use. Another concern is the queues fountains might cause, in a building designed for fast circulation of people between sporting events. She worries that a quick gulp from a fountain spout might not satisfy thirst over long periods of spectatorship. Despite her reticence on the fountain front, Megan Ashfield owns of drinking water: ‘It’s a given that you must ensure that people have access to that need.’ She explains how an ‘event continuation supply’ must also be available in an emergency, but that is a larger plumbing issue. With respect to the general free drinking water commitment that LOCOG announced in its press release, Ashfield says there are two likely options, which are either mains-fed tankers or bottled water. And in her opinion, the bottle is the best choice: ‘In terms of flexibility of supply, bottled water is actually the most efficient just because you can order one palette, or you can order 100.’ Coca-Cola’s distributors are likely to nod furiously in agreement. Whatever the architect might have advised at meetings, the final decisions about this were not hers. Bizarrely, these negotiations involved another team at her architectural practice. LOCOG contracted a team at Populous to provide the ‘overlay’ — the term for the temporary infrastructure that would flesh out the venues — but for reasons of client confidentiality, the two teams were not at liberty to discuss their projects beyond meetings convened by London 2012. Because of the design process, the drinking water solution was added on, rather than integrated to the venues’ final uses.
For James Bulley, LOCOG’s Head of Infrastructure, drinking water was only one issue in his daunting mission to prepare each venue for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Given his hectic schedule, he agreed to a telephone interview with ten months to go until Games time, late in 2011. Bulley had been involved with London’s preparations since the bid stage. His first response on the free drinking water question is candid, given that his paycheque was part-financed by Coca-Cola: ‘One of the commitments we’ve made is that, for spectators at our competition venues, we will supply a source of drinking water…irrespective of what the legislation may require us to do…’51 As previously mentioned, this is really a question of best practice rather than a sustainability choice. However, the method and prominence of the free drinking water offer can be widely interpreted. Drinking water provision first came onto Bulley’s radar early in 2010 when spectator experience and security were discussed. When those customers entered the private, golden-ticketed realm of the Olympic village or other venues, they were not allowed to bring any drink bottles in with them; at least full ones. He describes the security protocol as ‘airport style’. His colleague Paul Deighton’s promise back in 2009 that people can bring in their own water clearly preceded this security protocol.
Airport-style security rules means that if LOCOG did not provide free drinking water facilities, their customers would be forced to buy bottled water. Given the profile of the positive environmental claims of this Olympics, that issue is unlikely to have slipped under the radar of LOCOG’s Sustainability Team members who, as Bulley exclaims ‘have a bearing on everything’ (this is comforting to hear). He confirms that the sustainability advisors influenced the decision about free tap water provision, however it also involved input from members of the London 2012 Food Advisory Group. Sustain has been a member of this group throughout its planning but despite the organisation’s groundwork on bottled water issues, its representative, and Sustain’s Policy Director, Kath Dalmeny, had this comment on the drinking water discussions: ‘On tap water, I wouldn’t feel comfortable claiming a strong or pivotal influence. We were certainly one of several voices asking for this, but if memory serves me correct[ly] this included the Mayor himself, lots of people in the media…organisations on the Food Advisory Group, and just generally a kind of cultural sense of this would be the right thing to do.’52 Some further research reveals that the drinking water element of the food policy (not sustainability as previously mentioned) was in print as early as December 2009, when many of the venues could still have had drinking fountains plumbed in: ‘London 2012 will not only provide free drinking water at the Games, but will also work with venue owners to urge them to make sure it continues to be available in the Olympic and Paralympic venues beyond the Games.’53 With such strong words, one wonders why this was not written into briefs for the world-class architects tendering to design the venues. More attention to detail at that stage might have resulted in some fountains being integrated into the buildings from the outset. Architects may protest that this level of detail does not appear so early in the design process, but, if it does not, such details will inevitably get left out.
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.54 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.55 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.56 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. 57 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.58 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’.59
Council Pop
Michael Green calls tapwater.org a movement rather than an organisation, despite its title: ‘When all’s said and done its H2O; 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.60 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: £25,000.61
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 CO2, 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.’62 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.’63
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?