Council calls on residents to ditch bottled water ...

Excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Council calls on residents to ditch bottled water

3 October 2007

You can lead a resident to tap water, but you can't make them drink. That won't stop Manly Council from trying.

"Do people have to be sucking on water bottles all the time? They are like babies' bottles. It's almost like a fashion appendage now," said the Manly mayor, Peter Macdonald, who is calling on all councils to urge residents to ditch bottles in favour of tap water.

"It's a wonder there hasn't been a strong campaign against it in the past. There is usually a tap within reach and the cost of creating a bottle of water uses about 16 times its volume in water," he said.

Manly Council will put forward a motion opposing bottled water at the Local Government Association's October annual conference in Coffs Harbour.

"Anecdotally, we are hearing from our waste people that there's an increasing number of the 600-millilitre bottles, which people carry round, especially those with the sports top on them," Mr Macdonald said.

Coca-Cola Amatil, producer of Mount Franklin water, hit back.

"NSW councils are the only local governments in Australia [outside the Northern Territory] which have chosen not to participate in the National Packaging Covenant - an agreement signed by all Australian governments, Federal, state and local, as well as 470 businesses, which is working towards a national solution to achieving 65 per cent recycling rates, and other environmental outcomes, by 2010," said Coca-Cola Amatil's spokeswoman, Sally Loane.

But a spokesman for the Local Government Association said industry should take more responsibility for the waste they created.

"It costs the companies money to join the covenant but it's a fairly token amount. Some [funding] is made available in grants to councils to improve kerbside recycling but it's nowhere near what councils already pay for the service."

The NSW Government should follow South Australia's lead and introduce a cash-back system for used bottles, the spokesman said.

See - Call to ditch bottled water.