While the public water service Eau de Paris in the Blue Community / Blue City of Paris is promoting its tap water, private companies expand their water business. After Lausanne and Dubai, the Swiss company BE WTR is setting up a drinking water bottling plant in Paris, hoping to supply the capital’s upmarket hotels and restaurants, the French Les Echos reports.
Selling tap water… in bottles. Since 2021, the Swiss company that supplies bottled tap water to luxury hotels and restaurants seems to have found its clientele. After opening a bottling plant in Lausanne in 2022 and then in a hotel complex in Dubai, the company inaugurated France’s first tap water bottling plant in the 18th arrondissement of Paris on Tuesday 11 September. The BE WTR bottling plant, situated in Clichy, in the heart of Paris, will produce up to 1500 capped glass bottles of fresh, crisp still and sparkling water an hour.
And BE WTR announces: “BE WTR has coming openings in Abu Dhabi, China and Canada, so stay tuned!”
We conclude: The water provided by the public water services of Paris is so good that it can be sold by private companies. At least it is in glass and not in plastic bottles. But does it really make sense to pack tap water into bottles and pay money for water that you can get for free at every tap? And does it really make sense to transport these bottles around the town, causing traffic and pollution? And we wonder: How much is this private company paying to the public water service Eau de Paris for this water? Obviously there are enough people with too much money to make a company rich.
