It’s time we started taking notice of a grave threat to the environment. The consumption of bottled water in this country has grown in the past 25 years from less than a million bottles a year to more than a billion per annum.
It’s estimated that about one-fifth of these bottles are thrown away with the top screwed tightly down and an average of one ounce of water remaining inside.
Given that these plastic bottles are airtight, nonbiodegradable containers, this means that the water contained inside is withdrawn from the planet’s hydrosystem for the next 10 million years.
If present trends continue, it is estimated that within the next 400,000 years, not only will all the planet’s carbon be tied up in the plastic of these discarded water bottles, but also the entirety of the world’s oceans will be locked up inside these bottles.
The result is that humans of that future era will spend their lives swimming through an ocean of plastic water bottles, continually opening bottles to scavenge water, one ounce at a time.