Don’t buy Volvic 1L for 10L water packs

Have you have noticed this 1L for 10L campaign running on Volvic packs lately?

In a nutshell, for every 1 litre of volvic water sold, 10 litres of fresh water will supplied in Africa through the work of World Vision Ireland. Sounds good doesn’t it? You buy your bottled water and feel all warm and fuzzy that you are “supporting” charity works.

BZZZ. Wake up call. Quite apart from the fact that bottled water is an obscenity in a world of want, there is something very distasteful about a company like Volvic tugging at the heartstrings to obtain market share for their water.

Volvic’s parent company is Danone international and this campaign is apparantly part of their

“commitment to long-term sustainable development programmes that make a real difference to communities across the globe”

It gets better. The marketing director at Volvic has this to say :

At Volvic we are passionate about water and feel very strongly about the fact that millions of people around the world do not have access to the daily water they need.  Volvic 1L-for-10L is an exciting initiative and we want to work together with World Vision to deliver a long-term sustainable development programme that will make a real difference to communities across Africa. We hope that the whole of the UK and Ireland will get behind Volvic and World Vision and support 1L-for-10L.

Passionate about water? How about getting passionate about the planet and stop adding to the moutain of plastic waste your product produces.

Here’s an extract from an eye opening article in the London Independent that says it is far better to just saving the money you would have spent on the bottled water and giving it to charity instead.

WaterAid calculates that the cost of water for Tanzanians who buy their supplies from street vendors is about £4 per cubic metre, compared to about 80p per cubic metre for British tap water. If my maths is right, a cubic metre of Volvic, at current supermarket prices, will cost you a staggering £355 (and would supply drinking water for just ten people for a little over three months). So, if you were to stop buying Volvic and drink tap water instead, you would have enough cash spare to permanently supply a small village with clean water.

.. a £15 donation will cover the per capita cost of providing safe water, sanitation and hygiene education for years and years. Spend the same sum on Volvic and the cup will run dry after 45 days.

I really like the initiative of a restaurant in London of applying a voluntary charge of 15p for customers ordering tap water. This one restaurant has raised £10,000 over 3 years. Just think how much could be raised in Ireland if even a tiny percentage of restaurants started doing the same thing.

I wrote to World Vision today asking would they not have done more good by using the Water Aid example in the UK and rolling it out in restaurants in Ireland. I’m not really expecting to hear back from them to be honest, but if they do get back to me, I’ll update this post.

Just don’t buy into this campaign, drink tap water instead. You know it makes sense.