Australia's love affair with bottled water has left environmentalists and councils worried. Bottled water is popular in a hot country and its purchase is growing at a rate of 10 per cent per annum. About 550 million litres of bottled water were consumed in 2005, according to the Australian Beverage Council, with most purchases being made in addition to soft drinks, rather than replacing them. Only 35 per cent of bottles are recycled, the rest goes to landfill.
A report by the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute said global consumption of bottled water rose 57 per cent from 1999 to 2004 to 154 billion litres. Much of the growth came from countries such as Australia, where most tap water is just as high a quality as anything that can be bought.
Packaging worldwide required 2.7 million tonnes of plastic each year, the report's author, Emily Arnold, said while the manufacture of the bottles in the US required 1.5 million barrels of crude oil.
In Australia, the energy cost of buying water instead of drawing it from a tap was comparable to driving a car, said Mr Grant, who is the assistant director of design at RMIT University. While driving a car for one kilometre used four megajoules of energy, drinking a 600-millilitre bottle of water used 1.5 megajoules, when the transport costs were included. By contrast, drinking water out of a tap used only 0.2 megajoules, Mr Grant said. While Australians are enthusiastic recyclers at home, they don't get the opportunity with bottled water because it's usually bought when people are out at the movies, at the beach or shopping.
"Australia's recycling system does not collect away-from-home waste," Total Environment Centre director Jeff Angel said.
In South Australia, where consumers can redeem a deposit for drink containers, the bottles made up less than 10 per cent of the state's rubbish, compared with 13.4 per cent nationally.
Drink bottles also take up more space than other waste in rubbish bins, comprising 38 per cent of total volume of litter.
Manly Council, on Sydney's northern beaches has moved to ban the sale of bottled water in specified areas. It is providing purified water fountains instead where the public can fill water bottles. These kind of initiatives combined with higher rewards for the return of containers should reduce the amount of bottles in landfill. It just needs more co-ordinated action by all levels of government.
