A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

Globally, the bottled-water industry had sales of around 250 billion dollars in 2018, a fivefold increase since 2003, and bottled water overtook carbonated soft drinks to become America’s most popular beverage in 2016.

Stop at a filling station in the United States, and you will find that bottled water, ounce for ounce, costs more than gasoline.

America’s two leading bottled-water brands, Aquafina and Dasani (made by PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company respectively), are derived from municipal water supplies.

in both Europe and the United States, the quality of tap water is far more stringently controlled than the quality of bottled water.

A quarter of the world’s population, or around 2 billion people, use a drinking-water source contaminated with feces.

There are nearly 1.7 billion cases of childhood diarrheal disease annually, and it kills about 525,000 children below the age of five every year.

According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells and carrying it home.