By Dave Harcourt •
September 9, 2009
The small Australian town of Bundanoon is credited with having started the resistance to bottled water, that has now through an initiative by Thames Water, reached as far as Buckingham Palace.
What’s Driving This?
Ever since
- it became clear that the energy input to bottled water could be visualised as a bottle a quarter full of crude oil
- it was shown that the energy required to produce bottled water is 2000 times that to produce tap water
- Watkiss revealed that England imported 20,000 litres ( 5,500 gallons) of water from Australia but at the same time exported 20,000 litres of British water to Australia
- Australia suffered a drought that was so severe than it drove many farmers off the land
there was little doubt that things would start to happen.
By Andrew Williams •
January 30, 2009
Britain’s largest water company has been fined £125,000 ($180,000), after polluting London’s River Wandle to such an extent that it wiped out twenty years of painstaking conservation work in a single day.
The shocking incident occurred in 2007, when Chlorine escaped from a Thames Water sewage treatment works, killing most of the fish along a 3 mile stretch of one of the city’s most iconic urban rivers. Local residents tried to save some of the distressed fish by transferring them from the river into buckets of clean water, but they were too late. One man rescued a large number of eels, but found they were bleeding from the gills and they all later died.
The new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, repealed a legal challenge launched by the city’s former mayor and gave the go-ahead for the construction of a desalination plant last week.
Thames Water Utilities will now be allowed to continue building a plant on the north bank of the Thames River in the London Borough of Newham and begin construction of another plant in Beckton, East London.
“Today’s news is a victory for common sense,” stated Thames Water CEO David Owens in a press release. “The desalination plant is a vital part of our response to this situation, and we are committed to getting it built as quickly as possible, so it is available to provide more safe, clean drinking water to Londoners by 2010.”
