The necessary, simple and common gesture of drinking water, in addition to covering a basic need for health, can also be done in a sustainable way. Only with opening the tap already marks an environmentally positive difference, with the peace of mind that thirst is calmed down and the agency’s need for water is satisfied with the guarantee that tap water gathers the ideal safety and health conditions for consumption given the strict sanitary controls to be fulfilled.
Simple and positive gesture
“Drinking tap water is a daily action with a huge positive impact,” says Rocío Santiago, director of Operations of Aqualia. From the environmental point of view because it avoids plastic or glass waste, whose production, filling and transport cause impacts on ecosystems and generate greenhouse gases (GHG). According to a study by the Institute of Global Health of Barcelona, (ISGlobal) The impact on ecosystems of producing bottled water is 1,400 times greater than that of the entire process of supplying drinking water to the taps.
Also in the environmental field, according to the latest report of the Institute of Water, Environment and Health of the UN (2021), the bottled water market generated 25 million tons of plastic containers, to contain 350,000 million liters of water. The UN calls collective action to face the global pollution challenge that plastic waste involves. A material that is one of the most pollutants for the ocean and of which several studies calculate that more than eight million tons of bottles per year are poured into the sea. A last argument in this regard is provided by the data of the European Statistics System, Eurostat, which estimate that, at most, only 40% of the plastic containers that are generated in the Union are recycled.
Looking at the euro
Speaking of costs, the same study figure 3,500 times more the economic cost of bottled water. More precisely, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of Spain, figure at 0.21 euros per liter the average price of packaged mineral water, compared to the average price of 0.0019 euros per liter if it leaves the tap in data from the XVII National Study of Supply of Drinking Water and Sanitation. One last example would be in the data of the Organization of Consumers and Users, (OCU), who claim that drinking tap water costs families 5 euros a year, compared to 500 euros that it is worth drinking bottled water in the same period. Additionally, in Spain, tap water spending is well below 3% marked by the UN as a limit of affordability of the human right to water.
Health, the first
The water that comes out of the tap must pass the urban distribution network and, therefore, is extremely protected from the sanitary and legal point of view. And this is confirmed by Rocío Santiago, from Aqualia: «The water of the tap in Spain is the most controlled food product. It is subject to the control of more than 50 analytical parameters and its traceability is guaranteed from the origin to the consumer tap ».
The legislation to ensure water quality is increasingly demanding. Thus, since 2003 in the list of analyzed parameters, new additional pollutants are incorporated, such as bisphenol A, (a plasticizer), or the PFAS, (fluorid chemical substances), which come from industrial activity. Parameters related to microbiological safety, such as legionella, and other emerging pollutants such as endocrine disruptors are also detected. All these substances are also controlled to follow their evolution and provide additional knowledge about their presence in consumption water.
The regulations set an independent triple control that extends throughout the water production chain. These three controls are: Sanitary, by the Ministry of Health of the Autonomous Communities; technical and economic, by the municipalities; and for the self -control systems of the service managers themselves based on strict quality standards. Hence, Rocío Santiago highlights that «in Aqualia we allocate technical and human resources to ensure that tap water is safe and sustainable. To do this, our laboratories make thousands of annual determinations with the latest technology. Only in Spain more than one million parameters are analyzed per year ».
For its part, the Ministry of Health of the Government of Spain, which collects water quality data of the municipalities through the National Consumer Water Information System (SINAC), confirms that, in general, the quality of the water served to households in Spain is good and that less than 1% of the samples of various parameters breach the limits established in the regulations.