Talking about water supplies can be a slippery subject. There’s something like 326 million trillion gallons of water on the planet, which is constantly being cycled and recycled: It evaporates from the ocean, travels through the air, rains down on the land and eventually makes its way back to the ocean.
Since roughly 72 percent of planet Earth is covered by ocean, that means that 98 percent of those 326 million trillion gallons are salt water, thus undrinkable.
That leaves just 2 percent of the planet’s water as fresh—and 80 percent of that is locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. Which means in relative terms there is very little clean, fresh water on the planet and when you muck it up, as the mining industry is doing to aquifers, rivers and fisheries, it’s ruined forever. Dirty water is never again truly pure, no matter the filtration systems.
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