Spain obliges restaurants to serve tap water, while mineral water reigns supreme in Italy

“How do I take water? Still or sparkling?” This is the first question that restaurant customers are asked immediately after sitting down at the table. It is taken for granted that a bottle must be served and then charged, it easily reaches three euros in large cities. They don’t even consider offering tap water anymore. In Spain instead they thought it was half madness and within the Law on waste and contaminated soils for a circular economy, which will come into force in its entirety on January 1, 2023, require accommodation facilities to supply locally sourced water as an alternative, i.e. tap. The general objective of the law is to reduce waste and waste in 2025 by 13% compared to those generated in 2010 and by 15% in 2030.

“The standard of tap water is among those already in force but restaurateurs are struggling to propose it”, he explains Joseph Grezzi, Italian councilor for mobility of the City of Valencia, for more than twenty years in Spain and member of the red-green Valencian coalition Compromís. “But it’s starting to work, because more and more people are asking for it.”

In Italy the quality of water intended for consumption is ensured on average for 80.5% by groundwaternaturally protected” explained by the Ministry of Health, “on which an extensive system of controls by water service managers and Local Health Authorities is grafted”. Also in September at the Water Festival, organized in Turin by Utilitalia, the Federation of Water, Environmental and Energy Enterprises, it was underlined how excellent our waters are.

Nevertheless 52% of Italians regularly consume bottled water and 28% occasionally. On the podium of world bottled water consumers theItaly is in second place, after Mexico and first in Europe. Every Italian drinks 208 liters of bottled water in a year, for a cost of 240 euros per capita which evidently damages the environment as well as their pockets. Other less “catastrophic” estimates, such as those of Istat, speak of 220 liters and about 150 euros per person per year. The bottles bought would be between 7.2 and 8.4 billion which then become waste to be treated annually.

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Reading these numbers it is hard to understand the meaning of the situation in which we find ourselves. “In the end it is tap water distributed in bottles“, has explained Peter H. Gleickauthor in 2010 of the essay Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Waterwhich we could translate as Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. You can find her testimony on Netflix in the episode Troubled waters of the docuseries rotten.

It is from the ten years of the last century that the water to drink in Europe and in the United States began to be treated in a way that eliminated any health threats. And at the time bottled beer, which was previously one of the few alternatives to the often unhealthy publicly available one, became a niche market. It was the French Perrier that changed things. One of his first television commercials to make his way into the US market was 1979, starring Orson Welles. However, Perrier is practically a soft drink rather than a simple mineral water. Thus he went from selling three million bottles in the USA in 1976 to 200 million three years later. She then bought a series of companies that bottled spring water around America, until in turn it was bought by Nestle. “The explosion of this market began to put pressure on water resources,” adds Gleick. And since the sources are not enough, later the underground one was also included in this definition, the same as the tap in practice.

In a famous book, Be digitalNicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab of MIT in Boston, argued that unlike physical goods, data can travel freely without barriers, borders, duties. Almost thirty years later, accessing certain basic sites and services on the Web is difficult if not impossible in some countries. But you can go into a supermarket and buy a bottle of Fijian water that has traveled 16,000 km.

Overall that of mineral water is a bargain 280 billion eurosof which About 2.8 come from Italy. Legambiente supports this in a 2018 report which underlined the lack of sustainability of a similar market based on a resource that “costs too little, is worth a lot and too much is wasted”, especially in years of growing drought.

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While in Spain they are trying to move on, in other countries tap water is served more or less regularly, as in Portugal And Great Britain, while in others an intermediate solution is being sought. Since 2023 the government of Luxembourg will supply pitchers to restaurants to ease the transition from the mineral bottle monopoly. Tap water will have to be added to the menus but it won’t necessarily have to be completely free. “The goal has never been to make the pitcher of water free in restaurants and bars, but to leave the choice up to customers and restaurateurs,” he explained Lex Delles, minister of tourism and small and medium-sized enterprises, adding that “the price at which restaurateurs can offer carafes of water can be set freely”. In Belgium it is discussed, with the Flemish side opposed to the obligation and the Walloon side looking at what France has done.

In fact, since 1 January 2022, bars, cafes and restaurants across the Alps are legally obliged to offer free tap water to customers. “Catering establishments are required to visibly indicate on their menu or on an exhibition space the possibility for consumers to request free drinking water”, reads the law. Here, on the other hand, there is nothing like it and we don’t even talk about it. As we said at the beginning, the only constant is the first question the customer is asked at the restaurant: “How do I bring the water, still or sparkling?”