Why would companies ever stop making them when over one million plastic water bottles are sold every minute around the world?
The impacts of the daily expansion of the bottled water industry were reviewed in a new United Nations report out this week.
Progress toward global access to safe drinking water for everyone is significantly off track and has been slowed by the bottled water industry, the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health report says.
The report highlights that for less than half the amount spent globally on bottled water annually, the hundreds of millions of people still going without access to drinking water could be provided with needed clean water infrastructure.
The bottled water industry, the report found, not only diverts billions of liters of groundwater every year, which could eventually threaten free drinking water sources, while simultaneously fueling the world’s plastic pollution crisis.
The United States, China and Indonesia consume the largest amounts of bottled water.
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