What price drinking water?

Whilst rising energy costs could soon spell the end of the bottled water market as we know it, shortages of plain old tapwater are set to cause much bigger problems elsewhere in the world.

A couple of weeks ago I was in a hotel room in Vancouver. Having woken up jetlagged and thirsty I wanted to have a drink, but the bottles of water in the room were C$7 a piece; that's an astonishing £3.30 in real money. Needless to say, I headed straight for the tap

As well as being a patently outrageous price for half a litre of water, there was something else that was even crazier about the situation; the fact that the water was actually a bottle of Evian. It was French water, direct from an Alpine spring.

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