How safe is Tap Water in Seychelles?

The Public Utilities Corporation (PUC) have recently announced price increases in providing treated water in the Seychelles. In this regard, we now need to ask how much value are we the over-taxed public receiving for our money? It is common knowledge that PUC lose over 50% of the water that is treated in their systems. In other words we are being made to pay for their wastage and inefficiency.

Given that the government of President James Alix Michel has promised to deliver on better efficiency and productive in the workplace we again ask when will this filter through to the PUC? This goes against the lack of capital infrastructure maintenance and development of the current government.

Another issue that has been brought to light is that this government goes against international trends in the interest of a few “very good friends” who are within the water bottling industry. People are being made to pay more than a 1,000 times as much for bottled water in some instances where bottled water is no better than tap water. This can be seen in a number of establishments in the Seychelles.

An international campaign called “Think outside the Bottle” has been launched. The campaign has come about as a result of the fact that in some countries like the USA more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water. Here in the Seychelles given the bad publicity over hygiene surrounding the desalination plant and other issues like the raw sewerage next to the plant in Anse Boileau the public has had to turn to bottled water for health and safety reasons.

It is now time that proper standards are introduced with respect to bottled water. It should be noted that the plastic bottles are made from crude oil. A fossil fuel priced recently at USD 100 a barrel. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles. The effects of this upon climate change, recycling programmes, transportation and refrigeration brings the carbon footprint of producing bottled water will look good in Seychelles environment credentials.

With more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water, the $100 billion the world spends on bottled water every year could certainly be put to better use creating and maintaining safe public water infrastructure everywhere. This therefore brings up the question as to how safe is tap water in the Seychelles?