Hysteria over bottled water

All the normal suspects are calling for bottled water exports to be banned, implying the level of exports is a threat to our water supply.

Here’s the five key numbers:

1. Bottled water exports 8.7 million litres
2. Extracted water 10 trillion litres
3. Annual freshwater 500 trillion litres
4. Bottled water exports/extracted water 0.000087%
5. Bottled water exports/annual freshwater 0.000002%

Here’s an analogy in terms of something we can relate to – the size of NZ.

NZ comprises 268,021 square kms. If this represented our total annual freshwater, what would represent the total bottled water exports. It would be 0.0047 square kms which is an area equal to 69 metres long and 69 metres wide.

Another analogy is distance to the moon. The moon is 384,400 km from Earth. If this represented our total annual freshwater, then the distance representing bottled water exports would be 6.7 metres.