After some thought, I have come to the conclusion that the ignorance, self-interest and greed of the industrialised world can be best summed up in two words – bottled water.

It’s quite difficult to explain how society can be so thoroughly conned, but one way or another millions of us have been duped into thinking that there’s something wrong with our tap water and that it’s essential to pay through the nose for some highly-marketed water in a plastic bottle with a pretty mountain scene on the label.

The extreme nature of this gullibility is highlighted when we realise that we complain all the time about the cost of a litre of petrol, but are quite prepared to pay more for a litre of water.

The fact that we have been so thoroughly seduced by the marketing can perhaps be partly explained by the growth of water snobbery – we somehow think it’s superior to pay a thousand times more for bottled water than to fill up our own container from the tap.

The figures are quite astounding – more than 200 billion bottles are sold each year world-wide and three million tonnes of plastic are used to make the bottles. In the US, each American drinks 24 gallons of bottled water annually, and throws away 30 billion bottles, which took 17 million barrels of oil a day to make.

In the UK, municipal tap water – in my youth known as ‘corporation pop’ – is rigorously tested by the Drinking Water Inspectorate and more frequently than the supplies from the bottled water industry. All the tests show that there is no chemical difference between the two, and tap water is completely safe.

However, the real problem with bottled water is the environmental cost that could so easily be avoided. Producing bottled water releases 300 times more CO2 per litre than tap water and making a litre bottle requires 162g of oil and seven litres of water.

However, once manufactured there are all the emissions from the transport and it’s a real nonsense to import water from France and further afield.

A cubic metre of water weighs one tonne, and that takes some shifting. Less than a third of the water bottles are recycled with the rest either going to landfill or to incineration where they can produce dioxins and chlorine.

We should question why those large water coolers in workplaces aren’t filled with tap water, and perhaps encourage localities to ban bottled water outright, as in Bundanoon, in Australia.

A useful New Year’s resolution would be to avoid bottled water for the whole year, and if you need a bottle, fill it at the tap.