Thirst as a lifestyle choice

As we approach the start of Plastic-Free July (and yes, I will be blogging about it again this year) I was interested to hear that the Glastonbury Festival organisers are trying to reduce plastic waste. Good for them. How are they doing it? By “urging” festival-goers to bring reusable water bottles, and by selling reusable bottles on-site to people who didn’t get the memo beforehand. Glastonbury’s “green issues” organiser was quoted in the Guardian as saying: “We have amazing water quality in the UK but everyone is obsessed with drinking bottled water."

Maybe it’s time to look at the reasons behind that “obsession”, speaking as someone who occasionally buys bottled water myself. Why do I buy it? Is it because I’m a fashion victim who treats a chilled bottle of Evian as an accessory to my designer outfit? Or is it perhaps because I’m an earth-based life-form who feels an unpleasant sensation known as “thirst” when deprived of water for too long?

I try to be prepared. For four months of the year, I make a habit of bringing some water with me when I leave the house. (Those months are June, July, August and December.) But sometimes I forget, or I don’t bring enough. Because I’m not always perfect at predicting how warm the weather will be, how long I’ll have to wait for that bus, how demanding that cycle ride will be. And then I end up, miles away from home, feeling thirsty.

What exactly are my options at this point? How exactly do I access the UK’s “amazing water quality”? Knock on a stranger’s door? Go into a shop and ask for tap water? (I’ve tried this latter and – would you believe it – the shop staff swore that they didn’t have access to tap water, despite being in the middle of London!)

People don’t drink bottled water because they’re “obsessed” with it. They drink it because they’re human beings who aren’t organised enough to provide in advance for all their needs. They get thirsty and have no other options.

Music festivals are one of the few places where you can refill your water bottle in public. (Of course, to stop you getting too comfortable, there will probably be bad signposting, queues and the occasional pointless requirement to use that tap over there in the distance instead of this one right here.) But once you’ve left the festival, where are you going to refill that shiny new stainless-steel bottle you just bought?

If we had a culture in this country of providing drinking water in public spaces, things might be different. But we currently have a culture that’s about preventing public spaces from being a source of comfort. That’s why we have the “homeless spikes”. That’s why seats in most public spaces are designed to be impossible to lie down on and uncomfortable to sit on. That’s why bus-shelter seats are always a) uncomfortable and b) situated right in front of the timetable, so anybody who wants to look at it has to ask you to move.

It’s not that easy to join the dots and see these little things as part of the same attack, an attack on the concept of providing public spaces that meet some of people's basic needs for free. And it’s really not easy to push back on it. Much easier to blame the consumer and pretend to believe that use of bottled water is about choice. Because if you keep framing the conversation as being about consumers and their choices, you don't need to talk about human beings and their needs. But a stainless-steel “refillable” bottle is only refillable if there’s somewhere to refill it. If there isn’t, it’s just a useless fashion accessory, and I hope I don’t need to point out the irony of attacking thirsty people for their fashionable “obsession” in order to sell more of them.