
Around the world, factories are using more than 18 million barrels of oil and up to 130 billion gallons of fresh water a year to create something that, by and large, most people don't need. But the product is so amazingly popular that sales are going up 10 percent a year, just like clockwork.
The big success story? Bottled water. And the resources mentioned above are just to make the plastic containers.
Another 41 billion gallons of water is then used to fill them – water that is often just tap water, and other times has less frequent monitoring for safety or purity than if it had come out of a tap.
If you can't already tell, I think bottled water is probably the worse product ever.
Although, you gotta respect the balls some guy who once had the thought:
Hmmm, we've already spent billions of dollars to build the most widespread, safest, cleanest water distribution system in the history of the world, pipe it into every home in 3 or 4 places, offer it instantly ice-cold or scalding hot at the turn of a knob, and charge fractions of a cent to make gallon upon gallon of the stuff flow at will.
You know what would be a great idea? Let's run the same stuff through a cheap filter, bottle it, print a picture of some idealized mountain valley, and sell it to those same people for hundreds of times the price.
How much ridicule do you think that guy had to endure. And then time proves him right.
Brilliant!
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