Despite all the attention plastics get, can you believe we’re still guzzling from plastic bottles at such a rapid rate? This just for the UK only.
Imagine laying out half-litre bottles on the pitch at Wembley Stadium in London. You could fit 1.7 million bottles on the grass, packed into a tight grid. Now imagine building up layers of bottles, covering the same area, to build a tower. To contain all the bottled water the UK buys each year, you would end up with a 514-metre (1,686 feet) skyscraper (visual stats thanks to The Guardian). Globally nearly one million bottles are sold every minute.
If you haven’t got one already, grab a re-usable water bottle and bring it with your everywhere (good for your health too!). This is a consumer action we can control and along with investing in clean water infrastructure in places that don’t have it (Flint included), we can turn this around and hopefully see the trend decreasing next year.