What's the story with bottled water?

We like to complain about rip-offs in this country, but sometimes we only have ourselves to blame. Last year, Irish consumers spent hundreds of millions of euro on 135 million bottles of water while everywhere, outside a handful of blackspots, good quality drinking water flowed freely from taps.

The average price of a litre of bottled water in Ireland is around €1.50 - and it sells for several times that amount in many restaurants and cinema foyers. It is not just financial cost but bottled water's environmental impact that is making a growing number of people uneasy, as the BBC's Panoramaprogramme showed last week when it put Britain's love affair with the bottle under its microscope.

Worldwide, consumers spent more than €30 billion on bottled water last year, while 2.5 million tonnes of plastic bottles ended up in landfills or as litter. In the US, 30 million water bottles are dumped in landfills every day.

The production of a litre of bottled water emits hundreds of times more greenhouse gases than a litre of tap water. According to the Earth Policy Institute, around 2.7 million tonnes of plastic are used for bottles each year and making all the bottles for the US market takes 17 million barrels of oil - enough fuel to keep half of Ireland's two million cars motoring for a year.

The most sobering statistic comes from the World Health Organisation, which has reported that at least 1.6 million people die each year from drinking contaminated water: 90 per cent of these are children under five. Significantly more is spent in the developed world on bottled water every year than would be needed to eradicate the deaths of all those children infected with fatal waterborne illness.

Is it any wonder that on Panorama, British environment minister Phil Woolas said it was "morally unacceptable to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on bottled water when we have pure drinking water, when at the same time one of the crises facing the world is the supply of water. There are many countries who haven't got pure tap water. We should be concentrating our efforts on putting that right".

The Tory shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth agreed and described the popularity of bottled water as "an ecological nightmare". He said it raised questions about "the basis on which we have constructed our economic lives. By any rational standard, it's crazy to be importing water from countries far away when there's perfectly good water in our taps."

This week Thames Water, supported by Friends of the Earth and the British government, launches a campaign aimed at persuading restaurants, pubs and hotels to make tap water more easily available to customers.

It is not just in Britain where the tide is turning. A growing number of top restaurants in the US, where the bottled water market is worth in excess of $11 billion (€8 billion), have stopped selling bottled varieties in favour of filtered tap water due to environmental considerations. San Francisco has banned city employees from using public money to buy imported water, while in Chicago a five-cent tax on plastic bottles has been introduced.

Other US restaurants persist with the fizz, however, and New York's Ritz Carlton has even employed water sommeliers to guide diners through its expensive European waters.

While there are ripples of concern in Ireland, we have yet to see a serious backlash against bottled water. It is not uncommon to find restaurants selling bottled water for €6 a throw, while theatres and cinemas are often guilty of charging audiences even more - one Pricewatch reader contacted us recently after being charged €3 for a 250ml bottle of water.

BOTTLED WATER HASthe highest mark-up of any item on a menu, which explains why many restaurants push it at the expense of free tap water. There are exceptions however, and some of top Irish restaurants, including Patrick Guilbaud and L'Gueuleton, offer tap water alongside still or sparkling water.

Although Green Party leader John Gormley was appointed as Minister for the Environment last year, the Government has yet to adopt a strong policy on bottled water. This is perhaps because many citizens in recent months have not been able to drink tap water because of serious contamination.

A spokesman for the Minister told Pricewatch that buying bottled water was a matter of choice for consumers. He said that the Government's priority was to make sure there was good quality drinking water freely available."The most important element of our water policy is to ensure that through investment, everyone has access to safe, good quality drinking water," he said, adding that over the last decade, there had been a multi-billion-euro investment in the water system and in excess of one million homes now have "the best quality water imaginable", a comment that would no doubt draw mirthless laughter from the residents of Galway and Ennis.

Oisín Coghlan, director of Friends of the Earth in Ireland, says people should question why they are spending money on still water, which, he says, most people would find indistinguishable from tap water. "When you stop and think about the monetary cost and the environmental cost, you very quickly conclude that it cannot be a very good deal for consumers."