'Luxury
water' for £80 a bottle? It's ignorant, insensitive and
irresponsible
Katherine Purvis
Limited
edition water harvested from melting polar icebergs, is now on sale
at Harrods. It’s just another ugly indicator of our world’s many
inequalities
@KatherinePurvis
Wednesday 15
February 2017 12.54 GMT
We’ve reached peak
bottled water. From today, for a sweet £80, Harrods will sell
‘luxury water’ harvested from icebergs off the coast of Svalbard.
Svalbarði is the
brainchild of Jamal Qureshi, a Norwegian-American Wall Street
businessman who visited the archipelago in 2013, and returned with
melted iceberg water as a gift for his wife. He then, it seems,
decided to bring this water to more people.
Astonishingly, the
governor of Svalbard has approved Qureshi’s venture. He charters an
icebreaker to make two expeditions a year, in the summer and the
autumn when icebergs calve away from glaciers that run into the sea.
One-tonne pieces of ice are carved from these floating bergs at a
time. Using a crane and a net, they are lifted onto the boat and
taken to Longyearbyen to be melted down into bottles of “polar
iceberg water” which has has “the taste of snow in air”. On
each expedition, Qureshi plans to harvest 15 tonnes of ice to produce
13,000 bottles.
The environmental
sustainability of the venture is the first concern of many people,
Qureshi told the Guardian. “But we’re carbon neutral certified,
and we’re supporting renewable energy projects in East Africa and
China,” he said. “We also only take icebergs that are already
floating in the water and would usually melt in a few weeks, and that
can’t be used for hunting [by polar bears].”
Some may argue that
if you can afford to drink melted ice caps, who should stop you? Your
money, your choice. Depleting 30 tonnes of iceberg a year is,
arguably, not that much in the grand scheme of things. But Qureshi’s
venture is not the first of its kind. Tibet has already approved
licences for dozens of companies to tap Himalayan glaciers for
‘premium’ bottled drinking water. Ten major rivers that flow into
South Asia depend on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Disrupting their
source could have devastating impacts for water security across the
region.
And this is not the
only problem. First, sea ice is already melting. The extent of Arctic
sea ice shrank to its second lowest record last year and scientists
have warned this could have devastating impacts across the rest of
the world, such as shifts in snow distribution that warm the ocean
and change climate patterns as far as Asia, as well as the collapse
of key Arctic fisheries, which could impact other ocean ecosystems.
Icebergs don’t need yet more human interference – no matter how
small the scale – to speed up the melting process.
Second, the bottled
water industry is already giving us enough of a headache. It is
estimated that 3l of water are need to produce just one 1l plastic
bottle of water, which is more likely to be discarded and end up in
landfill than recycled. Beside the fact that our planet is slowly
silting up with plastic, it also takes huge amounts of fossil fuels
to make water bottles – plastic or glass – and transport them
around the world. In the US, for example, 1.5 million barrels of oil
are needed per year to meet the demand of the country’s water
bottle manufacturing.
But surely the most
problematic aspect of this product is the sheer insensitivity of
exploiting one of the world’s last wildernesses, and charging such
a high price for its product? This, while 663 million people
currently live without safe water. Consider the extremes: one person
pays £80 to drink water, never before touched by humans and
preserved by micron filters and UV light, while another – one of
159 million – depends on surface water, vulnerable to contamination
by faeces, parasites, pesticides and more. The emergence of luxury
water is just another ugly indicator of our world’s many
inequalities.
For so many of the
things we buy, there is a flashier, pricier, more luxurious
alternative for those who can afford it. Why travel in economy if you
could travel first class? Why buy from the high-street when you could
buy designer clothing ? Water, it seems, is just the next in a list
to receive this divisive treatment; why, if you live somewhere it is
clean and safe, drink water from a tap when you could drink bottled
water from “pristine peaks”, “artesian aquifers” and now
“from the top of the world”?
The wheels are in
motion. Precedents have been set. Will more wealthy entrepreneurs now
eye up other precious natural resources to create yet another
“must-have” item?
We already live
beyond our means. Our lifestyle choices see us using the equivalent
of 1.6 Earths to provide the resources we consume, and absorb what we
throw away. At such a time, Svalbarði seems insensitive, ignorant
and irresponsible. It’s time to live sustainably and consume
responsibly, not promote mindless habits just because some people can
afford it.
For some time, water
has been thought of as a commodity, and even the former UN special
rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation
believes it doesn’t have to be free. But something so precious, so
essential to all life – human, animal and mineral – should never
be marketed as a luxury.
Join our community
of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on
Twitter, and have your say on issues around water in development
using #H2Oideas.
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