Berlin mayor trying to get Germans off water bottles
BERLIN — When Germans are out and about, their water go-to is usually a bottle. But on a steamy afternoon in the nation’s capital, Berlin Mayor Michael Muller set out to convert them to the tap.
“It’s always available — and an environmentally friendly choice because it avoids the production of plastic and transport costs,” he told a small crowd of perspiring environmental activists, photographers and city employees.
Muller, 53, leaned over a bow-wrapped drinking fountain, filled a wine glass with water and proposed a toast to the fixture, an amenity long taken for granted in American cities but a quasi-revolutionary notion in Germany.
Public drinking fountains are surprisingly rare in Germany, which prides itself on environmentalism, innovation and universal access to basic necessities. But Muller and his colleagues hope to change that, setting an eco-friendly example for other German cities by adding 100 new fountains to the roughly 50 already in the capital.
Germans are among the world’s top five consumers of bottled water and the No. 1 drinkers of the fizzy kind. And that is despite the downsides: Bottled water, whether in plastic or glass, is expensive, heavy (bigger quantities are discounted), and a hassle to dispose of given Germany’s rigid recycling rules.
Public drinking fountains have not traditionally been an option. Even with 150 in operation, Berlin will hardly have enough for its nearly 4 million residents, although it will be far ahead of Hamburg, which has six, Cologne, three, and Munich, none.
New York City, by contrast, has roughly 3,100 fountains for its 8.6 million people, Vienna has 980 and Paris has 974.
Asked why the thrifty, pragmatic Germans have been so slow to adopt an obvious public good, Muller shrugged.
“It’s not rational,” he said. “Maybe it’s because there’s no beer flowing out of the faucets.”
Ironically, Berlin is catching drinking-fountain fever at precisely the moment when they are falling into disuse in the United States, victims of poor maintenance and the surging bottled-water market. In some cities, including San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago, bottle-filling stations have become a popular eco-friendly successor.
Environmental activists and politicians worldwide have long pushed cities to increase public access to potable tap water. Earlier this year, Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European Commission, told member states they should take such action to improve public health and to lower their carbon dioxide footprints.
The manufacturing and transportation of billions of bottles a day contributes to carbon dioxide emissions and global climate change, according to scientists. And despite extensive recycling efforts by countries such as Germany and Sweden, most of the staggering 1 million plastic bottles bought worldwide every minute end up in landfills or the ocean. Researchers estimate that by 2050, the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, and some warn it’s making its way into the human food chain.
In Berlin, however, those pro-fountain arguments may not suffice.
“What if someone spit in it at 4 a.m.?” said Katrin Strohmeier, a 31-year old project manager who has lived in Berlin for about 10 years. She wouldn’t think of using a public water fountain, she said, mostly because “I don’t trust people not to be gross.”
The fountains are cleaned every two weeks, and their water is tested monthly, according to Berlin’s Water Works. Although few studies on water fountains exist in Germany, U.S. scientists have found that they are generally safe, as long as they are maintained and the water is monitored.
The latter is certainly the case in Germany, according to hydrologist Michael Schneider, of the Free University of Berlin. “The public water supply is supervised many times per year with a huge list of parameters,” he said.