At a community meeting in July 2009, Bundanoon residents made history by voting 355 to 1 in favour of stopping the sale of still bottled water in their town. Later that year all nine businesses in Bundy selling bottled water took them from the shelves to become the first bottled-water-free town in Australia.  

This Bundy on Tap campaign created a global firestorm of publicity as they made a stand against bottled water, arguing strongly about the environmental impact of single use plastic bottles containing something you can drink almost for free from the tap.

The whole notion of putting water in a bottle and selling it for big bucks has been a marketing triumph, hasn't it?

"What ecosystem is your water from?" asked the label on a $9, yes $9, plastic water bottle sitting beside our bed in a hotel we were in not so long ago. Then followed the marketing twaddle.

"The purest water comes from the purest clouds. Our rainfall is purified by trade winds as it travels thousands of kilometres across the Pacific Ocean to Fiji, a continent away from acid rain and other pollutants, preserved and protected by one of the last virgin ecosystems on Earth."

Fiji, virgin ecosystems, what rubbish.  

They sell one bottle of a particular brand in Japan for around $400. According to the label it will help you lose weight, reduce stress and improve skin tone and quality.

Another brand selling for much the same price comes from high up in the Andes, and is described as being "so pure, so fresh and so clean that it remains untouched even by air until such time that it gets harvested and bottled."

There is one in Tasmania which claims to be "collected straight to the bottle from the sky without the water even touching the ground."

Amazing!

Our drinking water comes from the old Wingecarribee Swamp, lovingly filtered by the lads at the council water treatment plant. And it tastes terrific. What's more you can get thousands of litres of the stuff at the turn of a tap for the very same price as that one environmentally disastrous plastic bottle of water from Fiji. And I defy you to pick the taste difference.

In fact consumer organisation Choice couldn't either, concluding that bottled water is more expensive than milk, soft drink and even petrol, pointing out that you can buy more than 1000 litres of Sydney tap water for the same cost as a regular 600ml bottle water.

"But does bottled water trump tap in terms of quality?" they were asked. And their response;

"Probably not."

I am not surprised at their conclusion because I loved refilling the water cooler at work from the garden tap, then having a quiet chuckle as colleagues announced with such adamant conviction that, "this spring water is so much better than the stuff you get from the tap, isn't it?"

Yes indeed, we have been conned by arguably the greatest consumer deception trick since the days when travelling shysters sold snake oil at Moss Vale Show.

And since we are talking about water, we should finish with Dudley and Grace, who were perched on their roof waiting for the waters to recede from a particularly nasty flood when they spotted an old hat go past. Suddenly the hat turned and came back, then turned around and went downstream again. It did this a number of times.

“Did you see that Dudley?” asked Grace in amazement.

“It goes downstream, then turns around and comes back again.”

“It’s only old Jack next door,” said Dudley.

“Marge told him that come hell or high water, he had to mow the lawn today.”