The world's best hotels and restaurants are changing the way in which they serve water

You can ask for a bottle of Evian or San Pellegrino on the three-Michelin-starred Zen Restaurant in Singapore.

But you won't get one.

The restaurant, which charges nearly $500 per person for dinner, serves only water from Swedish company Nordaq, said chef Martin Öfner.

Dishes and drinks on the restaurant are also comprised of water, from the broths to the juices within the soft drinks, he said.

Zen is considered one of greater than 140 Michelin-starred restaurants that serves Nordaq water, company CEO Johanna Mattsson told CNBC Travel. The water, which is purified and bottled on-site using local tap water, can be available in greater than 700 luxury hotels, casinos and cruise ships, she said.

The company's goal is to scale back the variety of single-use water bottles within the hospitality industry – each the low cost plastic variety often present in hotel rooms and European glass bottled mineral water served in upscale restaurants. The latter can travel 1000’s of kilometers from its source to the place of its final consumption.

“Transporting water over water makes no sense,” Mattsson said. “That’s what we want to eliminate.”

Nordaq's bottles are freed from plastic labels in order that they could be easily washed and reused, and so they have wide openings in order that they could be cleaned in regular dishwashers, she said.

In addition, the bottles are securely closed and date-stamped after refilling, Mattsson said.

Mandarin Oriental Singapore has had Nordaq's tap water system since 2023, with bottled water available within the hotel rooms, restaurants, spa and gym.

Hotel manager Cindy Kong let CNBC Travel tour her bottling facility to see how the bottles are washed, inspected, filled and sealed. She said the plant can produce 500 bottles of purified water in an hour.

“We normally process between 1,000 and 2,000 [bottles] every day,” she said.

Nordaq is considered one of many firms within the world-class sustainable water business. Castalie water is out there in greater than 700 hotels in France, in keeping with its website, while Purezza water is served in greater than 5,000 venues in 13 countries, in keeping with the corporate's LinkedIn page.

Indian hotel company ITC Hotels has developed its own brand of zero-mile water called SunyaAqua to scale back the quantity of single-use plastic bottles across its 140 hotels. “Every guilt-free sip is bottled in-house, so no transportation is required,” New Delhi-based ITC Maurya wrote on Facebook in July.

Catering establishments are the core marketplace for the Swiss sustainable water brand Be WTR. The company operates in hotels – with a facility opening soon in Rosewood Abu Dhabi – and thru centralized facilities.

In the latter case, Mike Hecker, founder and CEO of Be WTR, said water may return a bit further than the ITC Hotel's “zero mile” water, but not by much.

“We don't want to transport more than 10 kilometers around our bottling plant because, as you know, the carbon footprint is heavily influenced by transportation,” he told CNBC. “We try to be as close to the point of consumption as possible.”

The company's important operations are within the United Arab Emirates, but its water is sold in 12 countries, including recent expansions into Canada and China, Hecker said. The company closed a $44 million Series C funding round in October.

Be WTR signed a world agreement with Accor to turn out to be a preferred partner for the French hotel company's luxury hotel brands.

“We are the first company to aim for a global water agreement [Accor’s] Five star brands like Raffles and Pullman [and] Sofitel,” he said.

Companies that offer filtered water to the tourism and food industries with little to no transportation say they save tens of millions of plastic bottles from consumption every year. But they’ve one other selling point: They may make a profit for his or her customers.

Be WTR’s Hecker said its first bottling plant on the Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi “has saved over a million imported bottles per year. And that is a significant achievement, both in terms of… the carbon footprint, but also in terms of generating positive profits for our customer.”

Hecker wouldn't say how much a bottle of Be WTR costs, but said the worth was “competitive” in comparison with glass bottled mineral water from Europe.

According to Nordaq's Mattsson, each bottle of water costs between 11 and 21 cents to provide. But the water costs rather more. Provider Singapore sells Nordaq free-flow still and sparkling water for $2 per person, but some luxury hotels charge 4 times that price for a single bottle.

According to 1 company, Purezza estimates that every of its bottles costs about 30 cents to provide, or a couple of fifth of the worth of normal bottled water Sales brochure. But each could be sold for a similar price, the brochure says, estimating that 1,000 bottles of Purezza water sold for $5 a bottle could bring the vendor an annual profit of $13,200.