An Inconvenient Truth: when trying to get it right, sometimes we get it wrong

We all know that plastic is bad, but it's just so convenient. We are surrounded by the stuff and our world would struggle to function without it. Our homes, our cars and our workplaces are visibily (and invisibly) littered with plastic objects, mostly functional, some merely decorative, but it's a pretty dead certainty that all are a cheaper option than a non-plastic alternative. Plastic has contributed to our throw-away lifestyle. It is derived from our rapidly-disappearing natural resources of natural gas and crude oil, it is a nightmare to degrade/dispose of it and very little is actually recycled. So what's my point here - this is a blog about water isn't it?

Litre for litre bottled water is 1000x more expensive than tap water. It usually comes in plastic bottles (the tie-in!) that are used the once and then thrown away. Here in the UK, we only send a paltry 15% of these bottles for recycling, the rest end up in landfill. So even if you buy a bottle of water and refill it a few times from the tap, there is an 85% certainty the bottle will end up in the waste bin. So what is the way forward? Well there are a number of options:

• public water fountains
• ban on all plastic bottled water (bottles from shops and those monster 18L containers for water coolers)
• ban bottle-fed coolers, only allow Point-of-Use (POU) coolers
• mandatory recycling of plastic bottles
• glass bottles

Let's take a look a water fountains. Great idea - water for all when we're out and about, but with fears of swine flu and other communicable diseases, would you want to drink from one? Water fountains can be fitted with swan-neck spigots to draw off water into cups and personal containers, but still require sanitisation maintenance. You don't see many in public places anymore - cost-cutting, vandalism and health issues are to blame. However, paying for water from public dispensers is now on the menu for London: HydraChill units have been sited at Hamersmith Bus Station and Tower Bridge Museum. The 400,000 visitors who pass through these sites each year can fill bottles or get a cup of chilled water for 20p. Will other public places follow suit?

Ban all plastic bottles. Well they have done in Bundanoon, Australia AND installed public dispensers, getting local shops to sell personal containers for them. Undoubtedly, personal bottles are a great way of individuals saving money on buying water and issues of appropriate disposal, not to mention the positive affect on the environment from the downsizing of plastics production, bottling plants and their delivery trucks, but it's remembering to have the thing with you at all times. Also, have you ever tasted water that has been sitting in a plastic container for a few days - not nice. Leeching of chemicals into the water from the plastic, especially when it has been sitting in sunight, has led to concerns for long-term health. Dioxins from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and bisphenol A used to make the water-cooler polycarbonate (PC) bottles have been mentioned, but the evidence is poor/inconclusive at this time.

Point-of-Use (POU) water coolers. These are plumbed-in water coolers that do save businesses £thousands each year. Earlier entries in this blog deal with the cost of bottle-fed coolers, the consequences of those delivery trucks as well as the safe storage and use of those massively heavy bottles. POU coolers require less sanitisation than bottle-fed units, so reducing maintenance costs. The main problem with POU coolers is knowing what you are buying/renting: unless stated clearly and/or you can see the filter at the back of the machine, it does not automatically FILTER the tap water to remove the chlorine, just chills or heats the water according to your chosen model. Filtered tap water tastes so much like bottled water that 'taste tests' usually fail to differentiate between them. What I will include here is the warning that if a bottle of water is not clearly labelled mineral or spring water - and most cooler water is not - then it is probably just filtered tap water that has been bottled!

Mandatory recycling/reuse is a strong possibility: Denmark is a real success story here. Until recently, beverages could not be sold in Denmark in plastic bottles - aluminium and glass were acceptable, as they are easily recycled materials. When pressed to permit plastic bottles, the Danish government legislated that the beverage industry itself took responsibility for the recycling with their own collection points that put the bottles back into their own system. The result is that over 95% of plastic bottles are recycled in Denmark. In a simlar vein, last year in New York State, a mandatory 5-cent (that's around 3p) recycling deposit was placed on all bottled water sold in the state, including containers less than 1 gallon (3.8 litres). It's estimated that this deposit will raise $115 million (£75 million) in revenue for the state and 'encourage' recycling.

A strong alternative to recycling is using a biodegradable PET-type of plastic to form bottles. For example, ENSO is billed as "the world's first truly recyclable and biodegradable pastic bottle". It claims to be biodegradable in a landfill environment (anaerobic degradation, in the absence of oxygen), rather that just compostable (aerobic degradation, in the presence of oxygen) as most PET alternatives actually are. Crucially, it does not contaminate regular PET recycling methodolgies (in which plastic is reduced to pellets before being reformed into new objects), so ENSO can go on to become another bottle again.

Glass bottles are often more attractive than their plastic counterparts. A number of water cooler businesses now market glass bottles to their customers, as do we at Just Water Now. It is a great opportunity for a restaurant/cafe/hotel/leisure centre to market itself by having their glass bottles personalised with their company logo. They can be washed out and reused multiple times and they can look great on a dining table. However, glass is potentially dangerous: the Starbucks Coffee Company has had a nightmare this year within month of launchng their own glass bottles in North America. Starbucks had to recall over 12,000 bottles after receiving 10 reports of shattered glass - 8 of which involved customers. Ouch!

So there is no easy answer - and legislation is another dose from the nanny state that we live in. What is the way forward? Perhaps we just have to stop, think and be prepared to take a little personal responsibility for our lives of convenience and consider whether a few voluntary inconveniences now may ultimately save us from future involuntary hardships with respect to our natural resources. After all, with 25% of the world's population being without safe drinking water today, we in the UK are very fortunate.

Water is weird! A few odd things about the wet stuff

Water is the stuff of life. 70% of the Earth's surface is covered with it and our bodies are mostly composed of it: our brains alone are 75% water. We can last for a month or more without food but less than a week without water. Man has always been facinated with it: seeing insects able to walk on water using its surface tension, fish surviving in liquid water at the bottom of a frozen pond, the awesome power of ocean waves or falling water.

Water is a simple molecule consisting of one Oxygen ion and two Hydrogen ions, hence its formula H2O. It is a polar molecule and so tends to form hydrogen bonds between individual molecules. When water is a solid (ice), these additional intermolecular interactions give rise to an ordered tetrahedral shape. As heat is applied to ice, the number of ordered tetrahedral structures is reduced causing a more disordered arrangement in which the molecules are more densely packed at 4oC. Hence weird fact number 1: water at 4oC is ~9% more dense than ice so ice floats. But... as more heat is applied to water, it causes the water molecules to vibrate more so they move apart and density drops again, so that water starts to follow the same rule other liquids: it is less dense than its solid state.

Going on to weird fact number 2: it takes a lot of energy to heat up water compared to other liquids. The reason is that stable ordered tetrahedral structure: much of the extra heat energy is needed to convert it into the disordered structures, rather than make the molecules vibrate more. Most energy is required between 0oC and 35oC when it steadily removes regions of ordered tetrahedrons from the water. Above 35oC, there are so few tetrahedrons left that water can behave like a regular liquid.

Weird fact number 3: water is unusually hard to compress. The strong attraction between disordered water molecules keeps them closely packed already, more so than other liquids, so there is not much to compress when pressure is raised.

Weird fact number 4: water molecues are more able to diffuse at higher pressures. High pressure produces more disordered structures which are more mobile than the ordered tetrahedral molecules.

Weird fact number 5: water has an unusually high melting/freezing point (0oC) and an unusually high boiling point (100oC). All due to those intermolecular interactions binding the water molecules together.

Weird fact number 6: liquid water exists at very low temperatures and freezes when the temperature is raised. We all know that water solidifies at 0oC, but it is possible to supercool water at normal pressure and maintain it as a liquid down to about -42oC. This is not just an experimental phenomenon, it's found in nature when frogs and fish can survive long winter.

And finally my favourite weird fact number 8: once its evaporates, a water molecule spends around 10 days in the air before coming back...

Remember it's just water now, not magic!