NEW: UK Bottled Water Statistics

When was the last time you heard a fact about bottled water use?

Have you recently searched for 'bottled water stats'?

In the midst of the plastic crisis, bottled water has become the number one enemy. Something which is a simple part of our everyday lives being bottled into single use plastic and sold for between 500-1000 times more expensive than tap water is pretty outrageous after all.

Given the increased publicity bottled water has been receiving in recent years, it can be difficult to separate the woods from the trees in terms of statistics. Why? Because there is so many. There's facts about bottled water use, recycling rates, cost, chemicals inside the bottles, plastic bottle use as a whole, global stats, national stats... The list is endless.

However many of these stats are outdated due to the fast-moving nature of consumer goods and the bottled water industry's unprecedented growth in the last 10 years.

So, we wanted to put together a post with as many reliable, valuable and up to date bottled water facts as we could find. We've even consulted and we want to make this to be the go-to place for bottled water statistics, to save you the time of having to trawl through all of The Guardian's environment articles picking out each fact one by one.

Here is the list of 12 astonishing bottled water statistics:

1. 7.7 billion single-use plastic water bottles are consumed in the UK every year (The Guardian)
2. The UK Bottled Water Industry is worth more than £2.4bn per year (BritishBottledWater.Org)
3. In 2017, 19% of the UK population drank bottled water everyday (Mintel Bottled Water Report)
4. New research found that more than 90% of bottled water brands contained micro plastic contamination (Orb Media)
5. Single-use PET plastic water bottles take 400 years to decompose (Forbes)
6. On average, in the UK we drink more than 50L of bottled water each per year (The Guardian)
7. In 2017, 76% of the entire UK population used bottled water (Mintel Bottled Water Report)
8. Global consumption of bottled water in 2017 was 391 billion litres (Statista.com)
9. Sales of plain bottled water in retail stores in the UK rose 8% in 2017 (TalkingRetail.com)
10. In 2017, bottled water sales outstripped Coca-Cola sales for the first time (The Telegraph)
11. Production and transportation of the world's demand for bottled water uses the equivalent of 160 million barrels of oil per year (TheNational.ae)
12. Bottled water makes up half of all plastic bottle waste in the Thames (London.gov.uk)