The Guardian view on tackling our plastics problem: don’t bottle it | Editorial

Annual consumption of plastic bottles is set to top half a trillion by 2021. We cannot afford this addictionInvention is the mother of necessity, warned Thorstein Veblen. So packaged water is now seen as essential by many, and a million plastic bottles are produced every minute worldwide, as the Guardian series Bottling it has revealed. In the UK, consumers pay up to 1,000 times more than they do for tap water for a potentially less safe product. But the true cost is not to our pockets. Most of