SALES of mineral water have soared to almost a billion litres a year in the UK, prompting warnings that the trend poses a serious environmental menace.
As the hundreds of millions of empty plastic bottles pile up, consumers are being urged to return to drinking tap water at home and in restaurants.
Just over half of all adults drink bottled water, making it an industry worth around £1.8bn a year
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New figures from the Department for the Environment, obtained by Scotland on Sunday, show that UK consumption of mineral water has increased by 30% from 747 million litres in 2001-02 to 965 million litres in 2005-06. At that rate of growth, consumption of mineral water is expected to top one billion litres by the end of this year.
But Friends of the Earth Scotland's chief executive, Duncan McLaren, said: "Bottled water represents a huge cost in wasted resources compared with the very high quality water that is sitting in our taps at a fraction of the price to the planet and to our wallets.
"People should choose the tap and not the bottle. It takes enormous amounts of energy to transport bottled water, fuelling climate change.
"It's absolutely absurd to be putting these very heavy, bulky yet super-cheap products in bottles which weigh almost as much as the product and carting these around the world."
Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland, added that water sold in plastic bottles posed a greater environmental risk than glass bottles because plastic does not degrade when deposited in landfill sites.
"Local government, private companies and other organisations can make a big difference by serving tap water but we should all be trying to say 'no' to those nice bottles of sparkling water from places like Italy."
Perthshire-based Highland Spring is the UK's leading bottled water producer and comes second to Evian in the popularity stakes. It insists that it tries to address environmental concerns with much of its water sold in glass bottles, 70% of which are made from recycled glass.
It uses haulage contractors to transport its products by road but says it supports the proposed reopening of Blackford rail station, near its bottling plant.
Sally Stanley, Highland Spring's marketing director, said: "Highland Spring is committed to protecting the environment and developing the business in a sustainable, eco-friendly way."
The Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, said it always bought Scottish water and currently uses Speyside in glass bottles.
Ian Fleming, chairman of the Glasgow Restaurateurs Association, said his 95 members - who include The Buttery and One Devonshire Gardens - were merely responding to consumer demand for bottled rather than tap water.
"We could all survive without the profits from bottled mineral water, but the first stage in such a strategy has to be a change in customer behaviour - if they want tap water, we will serve it - as we already do, for free, even though we are paying for it."
He added that customers should not feel embarrassed about ordering tap water.
Ian Hall, a former chairman of the National Mineral Water Association who now works as a consultant, pointed out that tap water also carried an environmental cost, partly due to the repair work needed to deal with high levels of leakage from ageing lead pipes.
He said: "This country needs the bottled water industry. It's valuable economically particularly in the rural areas that source much of the UK industry. People also choose bottled water because it's a healthy substitute for soft drinks."
He added that bottled water had been vital to those areas of the English Midlands where the water supply was contaminated in this summer's floods.
