Bottling it, Primary School Teachers

 Millions of people prefer to open a bottle of still water rather than turn on a tap, market research has shown.

Despite a cost of living crisis, the average adult drinks almost a litre of bottled water every week. Researchers point to a growing perception that spring water is healthier.

... Emma Clifford, an associate director at Mintel [a retail analysis company] said:

" The popularity of bottled water has endured despite the sustainability and money-saving benefits of using tap water instead."

Still Life with Blue Bottle
Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934)
Photo Credit: Yale Centre for British Art  [Public Domain]

A separate poll by Yonder, a business consultancy, found that 18 per cent of Britons drank only bottled water. This excluded tap water boiled for cups of tea or coffee. A survey of 2,080 people commissioned by Air Up, which makes scented pods for tap water, found that 23 per cent of Britons threw away or recycled five to ten plastic bottles a week.

A tenth of respondents said most of the bottled drinks they bought were not recycled but 28 per cent said they would drink more tap water if it tasted better.

The trend for specialist water accelerated this year with a store stocking bottles costing up to £130. It sold water from Artic icebergs as well as condensation from fog in the Algarve.

Supermarkets are embracing the trend. Waitrose sells a natural spring water with rosemary extract by No1 Botanicals for £3.45 for a 750ml bottle. Ocado stocks "alkaline ionised" Scottish water by Actiph for £2.25 for 750ml. Getir, the delivery company, said bottled water was one of its five most ordered items.

Milin Patel, 40, a water sommelier of the Fine Water Society, who also owns Fine Liquids, a shop in Fulham, south west London said:

"Tap water is ... the best option if it's from a safe and reliable source, like in the UK. It's more regulated than bottled water." ... Bottled waters I drink like a fine wine and understand where the waters are from... My outlook on this is tap water for hydration, bottled water for an experience."

(Louise Eccles. The Times, 2022) 

It must be April 1st. 

The perception that spring water is healthier. Where does that come from?

Nearly one in five Britons drank only bottled water unless it was for tea or coffee. What?

Scented pods for tap water?

£130 for a bottle of glacier water, best drunk at 4C, from Gran Campo Nevado in Chile. Don't fancy that?  How about some Portugese condensation from fog? No? Svalbardi, from Artic Icebergs then - £120.

A water sommelier from the Fine Water Society?

Bottled water for an experience. What tosh.

Of course if you buy your water you  may well want to purchase a designer water bottle!

... Dior thinks our bottle should be orange or blue and patterned with toile de Jouy, and that we should absolutely not have an issue with stumping up 170 quid for it.

Prada advocates a water bottle that might best be characterised as the love child of a milk churn and a steampunk prototype (£120).

Christian Louboutin's is covered with a whimsical illustration of the more stylish variety of beachgoer (£75). Anna Hindmarch's has eyes (£45).

... The other way to go is to put your common-or-garden water bottle in a posh holder. This, remarkably, is not the cheap option. Rather the reverse. To wit: the raffia crochet and leather ensemble from Saint Laurent, a snip at £485, although that does not - repeat, does not - include the actual bottle. Fendi's monogrammed leather take is £520.

This is mere entry-level fare. A Louis Vuitton double act is £1,310...

(Anna Murphy, The Times, 2022)

[The piece below - three years ago.]

Bottled Water

Blue and Green Bottles and Oranges, 

Spencer Gore (1878-1914) 

Photo Credit: Yale Centre for British Art 

For all the innovation and choice that define the food and drink industries, if you want to make money, you could do a lot worse than bung some water in a bottle and flog it. A litre of tap water, the stuff we have ingeniously piped into our homes, costs less than half a penny. A litre of bottled water can cost well over a pound, especially for something fancy that has been sucked through a mountain.

Yet the bottled water market is more buoyant than ever, defying the plastics backlash inspired by stricken albatrosses on the BBC’s Blue Planet, and a broader, growing sense that something has to change.

Sales in the UK were worth a record £558.4m in the year to last November, an increase of 7% according to the latest figures from the market analyst Kantar.

“It’s very surprising to me,” says Sam Chetan-Walsh, a political advisor at Greenpeace and campaigner against ocean plastic. “Public awareness has never been higher, but the message is not quite reaching all the people it needs to…If a product that is so nakedly unnecessary can exist, then the whole system is failing.”

…But even if large numbers of us are quitting bottled water because of care for the environment, others are taking it up. The introduction of the “sugar tax” on juices and fizzy drinks has pushed more people to bottled water, while health awareness has boosted its desirability. Kantar says tap water consumption is growing at roughly the same pace (we still drink almost three times as much tap water as bottled water)

…Flavoured water is booming: sales of the sparkling variety shot up by 20%, according to the latest Kantar data.

…As is so often the case, ingenious marketing can trump reason; awareness is rarely enough. “There is always this kind of slip between concern, intent and changed behaviour,” says Giles Quick, an analyst at Kantar. “The best example is five a day. Almost everyone is aware of it, but something like 15% of us achieve it.” Unless a far-reaching bottle ban does come into force, it will be up to consumers to not only demand change – but to act themselves.

(Simon Usborne, The Guardian, 2019)

A few questions. Why does anyone drink bottled water? Why did anyone start to drink bottled water? Ingenious marketing? I don’t think so. If that was the case why aren’t more of us in this country, drinking bottled water? We only drink three times as much tap water as bottled in the UK. How pathetic is that? Just drink tap water when you are thirsty. Rant over.

 Primary School Teachers

The Incorrigible
John Burr (1831-1893)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

... A 2018 study of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that English primary school teachers worked a 52-hour week, more than any other country except Japan. "It could be so much easier, Lee (male primary school teacher]  writes, "if you could simply tell parents to - how can I put this politely and in a politically correct way? - GET A GRIP."

Examples include a parent who wrote an aggressive note to the teacher about a 1/10 mark the child had been given in a spelling test, threatening to complain to the governors as the child had not had enough time to prepare. It turned out 1/10 was the date.

Another parent sent four emails in succession one morning and then asked to invoice the school for her time, £25 an email, as she had received no reply - the teacher was teaching at the time. One teacher was berated for not giving the child enough time to grieve the loss of their tooth.

Another teacher was harangued for not thanking the parent enough for home schooling during lockdown. When one teacher said he witnessed a child break their own glasses, while the child had said it was the action of another boy, the parents went on the attack: "Why are you watching our son?"

... Meanwhile, a common complaint to teachers is about social media platforms: in the book [This Is Your Own Time You're Wasting] Lee cites a parent asking him to sort out a group of girls' WhatsApp arguments - he privately thinks, "How about you don't let your daughter have WhatsApp when she's six." But he says the problem is the government does not give this issue curriculum time: most schools only have one day a year allocated to the subject...

(Helen Rumbelow, The Times, 2022)