The Importance of Being Returned from Bottled Water to Tap Water in Turkey in Terms of Sustainable Development

In Turkey after 2000s, prefering policies of aimed at boundary spanning of urban areas and increasing of urban population, correspondingly, passing to supplying urban drinking water requirements from central water treatment plants have caused to arise important problems in terms of sustainability. In spite of purifying process in accordance with domestic water standards especially in the metropoliten cities like Ankara and Istanbul, tap water has become not to drink. So, spring water being necessary to be strategically protected has commenced to be consumed as a bottled water for drinking water purposes, instead of concentration on why tap water cannot drink. Today being explicitly experienced effects of climate change any more, it is important that tap water can become to drink again in regards to sustainable development. Consequently, it is necessary to study topics in terms of economic, social, environmental, management and sustainability that whether new urban and urban water infrastructure systems planning policies should be preferred to ensure that the tap water quality of urban water infrastructure systems will become drinkable standard or policies aimed at bottled water, where plastic pollution is increasing day by day and causing serious health problems and environmental pollution, should be preferred. Therefore, the primary purpose of this article is to evaluate how the return of bottled water to tap water for drinking purposes can be achieved in Turkey. The secondary purpose of the article is to reveal the importance of achieving the potability of tap water in terms of sustainable development. In this context, a theoretical analysis based on literature review and professional knowledge and experience is preferred as the method in writing the article. In this connection, in the introduction section is summarized the reasons and solutions for not drinking tap water, and revealed its relationship with sustainable development. In the second part, methods to solve tap water quality problems are tried to be presented as a holistic view. In the third part, domestic water supply systems; in the fourth part, the relationship between sustainable development and urban tap water is discussed. It is defend that sustainable urban water service can be only achieved through sustainable urbanization. Finally, in the conclusion section; it has been concluded that planning the distribution of drinking water is as important as the production of drinking water, for this, the current urban planning approach and the existing centralized conventional water infrastructure systems must be changed, and sustainable urban water service can be achieved by planning a multi-centered, flexible, multi-source, multi-disciplinary integrated urban water infrastructure system based on protecting intergenerational equality, resistant to climate change, a nature-based, nature-respecting, water-sensitive urban planning approach.