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Every Thursday teatime, two free newspapers pop through our letterbox.
If I can get to them before our feline shredders, I might spy in the classified
pages a couple of job advertisements which read something like ‘You drink
it. You wash in it. Now make a fortune with it’. Similar adverts appear
elsewhere, provincially and nationally. They interested me because I had
met someone who claimed to have been stung by a chain selling scheme run
by a company vending water filters: he had responded to such an advertisement.

I was not surprised to discover that I could indeed make a fortune buying
and selling water filters, and that water filters are the boom product of
the 1990s – just as microwaves were in the 1980s. I was told to act fast,
and the first step to this fortune was to sign a fat cheque – or preferably
lots of fat cheques in succession – to the Mega Water Filter Company Inc
(MWFC Inc) from Americaland, and Bob’s your uncle. That’s not its real name,
incidentally. MWFC Inc works like this:

Get to hear about MWFC Inc through one of its chain-sellers, or respond
to an advert it has placed, and you’d be loaned a video. This clever film
show will show you pictures of Big Bad Industry spewing all kinds of crud
into the air and rivers, followed by pictures of grotty water and such-like.
A deep-voiced, authoritative presenter with the obligatory mid-Atlantic
accent will guide you through this environmental carnage and lead on to
a child drinking a glass of water.

Needless to say, the water in the glass is dangerous unless it has first
passed through a water filter, because ‘leading scientists’ with ‘scientific
evidence’ say so. Every home should have a water filter – and most will
have, according to ‘leading marketing experts’, intones the mid-Atlantic
commentator. Then a series of graphs, charts and explanations tell you how
you will get rich by (i) buying MWFC Inc filters and reselling them, (ii)
persuading other people to do the same, (iii) persuading the persuaded to
persuade others, and so on. If this impresses you, then move on to Part
Two.

This takes place in a ritzy hotel and will have as much hype and religious
fervour as TV evangelism in the American Bible Belt. A first generation
of MWFC Inc followers will show you the ropes to the specially selected,
‘high calibre people’. Not that they will ask for evidence of a disciple’s
calibre. Just your money. You then buy as many filters as you want, and
then resell them at a mark up of 50 per cent. You also buy a licence which
allows you to buy and sell MWFC Inc filters – a vague franchise arrangement,
but with little of the backup associated with franchises.

Then you are on your own until, to use the MWFC Inc hype, you reach
Multiple Dimension: beget several generations of the persuaded, and not
only does MWFC Inc give you a small commission for each filter sold, but
it will then give you a budget for marketing. You can actually get quite
rich once you have reached Multiple Dimension, and a few people have. Yet
these are the kind if people who could succeed at anything.

For normal people, caveat emptor applies. First, you pay for the filters
up front and the onus is on you to resell them – forget about sale-or-return
arrangements, or invoices with 30 days’ credit: if your sales acumen should
abandon you on the long, costly path to Multiple Dimension, then it’s no
skin off MWFC Inc’s back because it has sold at least one more filter, and
there are plenty of people waiting to fill your vacant footsteps. Secondly,
until you reach Multiple Dimension, you pay your own overheads. In these
circumstances, a 50 per cent mark-up is pitiful. You would have to sell
one hell of a lot of filters very quickly to make it really worth while.

Thirdly, chain selling is like chain letters: just about everybody gets
them and loses a few pennies, but hardly anyone gets rich from them. So
in cold, commercial terms, MWFC Inc not only gets sales people to work for
commission alone – effectively working for nothing – but persuades them
to invest in the company’s growth and pay its sales overheads too.

MWFC Inc filters are also expensive even at the ‘wholesale’ price –
after lots of investigating at plumbing shops, builder’s merchants and adverts
from various sources, I discovered that several companies produce comparable
filters which cost as little as a third as much. So why do people get sucked
in by the hype?

Apart from the dangling carrot which draws you to the riches of Multiple
Dimension, environmental scaremongering helps a great deal. This is a marketing
ploy used by other manufacturers of water filters too. For example, ‘Do
you really care whether you and your family are healthy? Then use a water
filter,’ commands an advert for a British filter. A German producer tries
to persuade us to buy its filters because, once again through ‘scientific
sources’, ‘no area in Britain meets EEC standards for drinking water’. This
raises two issues: is Britain’s drinking water so dire, and are water filters
the answer?

First, the water. Most of it derives from aquifers in the ground. Before
being pumped on to users, it goes through an array of treatment plants to
purge it of contaminants such as pesticides, nitrates, fertilisers, bacteria,
heavy metals and sediments. Inspections are now made daily by the water
companies, and an independent watchdog – the Drinking Water Inspectorate
– makes spot checks to ensure that standards are maintained. In Britain,
water companies have to comply with about sixty parameters, and many of
these are aesthetic standards.

According to a spokesman from North West Water, ‘Ninety-nine per cent
of the time, our water is well within EEC guidelines. Exceedances do happen
though, but these are usually short term peaks and there is no evidence
to show that these peaks are as dangerous as the vendors of water filters
claim.’ Yet these vendors of water filters will readily quote these peaks
as if they are a continuous violation of the standard.

That said, accidents can happen, and the aluminium content, for example,
can soar to potentially dangerous levels. Whether these can be avoided or
not is a moot point. The water companies say they are tackling the problems,
especially where nitrates and aluminium are concerned – aquifers in some
areas of Britain are burdened with high levels of nitrate. But are domestic
water filters the answer?

Water filters mimic some of the simpler aspects of the groundwater treatment
plant. The most common types comprise a candle of ceramic material and activated
charcoal impregnated with silver. These will remove most of the heavy metals,
sediments, and organic residues, while the silver will kill any bacteria
present. It is tried and tested technology, and it works well – they can
go a long to cleaning up dirty water. There are, however, several caveats.

First, they are not designed to cope with pollutant peaks associated
with disasters. Secondly, while they are extremely efficient for the first
litre of water, their performance declines steadily. Ask the candle to do
too much, and after a time, the contaminants will be released back into
the water. Thirdly, few will remove all nitrates or lead.

So should we bother with water filters at all? Keith Osborne, an occupational
health expert with North West Water, says: ‘They are very good for aesthetic
reasons. They are also great for removing chlorine – dis-infectants are
necessary but they do not taste good. However, we disagree that water filters
are essential to bring potable water up to European Community standards
– it’s scaremongering.’

So what about lead in water? In our town, for example, potable water
often exceeds European Community standards because of the abundance of lead
piping in the ancient houses which dominate the place. ‘There are three
answers to that,’ says Osborne. ‘You can replumb and remove the lead pipe,
or you can let taps run for up to a minute before you use the water for
consumption, or you can use a filter. Just make sure it contains ion exchange
resins, or it won’t remove lead.’ I posed the same questions to a Fellow
of the Institute of Public Health Engineers, and got similar answers.

So there you have it. Next time someone tells you that all areas of
Britain suffer from undrinkable water and insists that you need to buy a
water filter for health reasons, they are probably selling them. And if
someone offers you membership of a chain sales scheme for water filters,
bear in mind that only a few get rich. So long as water quality is not perfect,
someone somewhere will exploit the fact.

Water quality seems to be improving in Britain and the rest of the Western
world. Meanwhile, in the Third World, around 30 000 children die every day
through water-borne diseases. All they need is clean water. Perhaps they
would find better use for water filters than us.

Richard Gould is a freelance journalist.