Humans Are Seriously Messing Up The World’s Drinking Water

Clean, drinkable water is more than a precious resource — it’s crucial to human life. Unfortunately, population growth and pollution are threatening to seriously undermine the availability of clean drinking water in many of the world’s major cities. According to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, water treatment costs have risen by 50 percent in a third of large cities around the world.

That means that getting clean, pure drinking water to people has become an increasingly difficult task, requiring cities not only to pay for expensive treatments, but pay for the construction of treatment plants to dole out said expensive treatments. All told, the study estimated that the total cost of degradation to our drinking water — in terms of treatment costs — is around $5.4 billion annually....
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/27/3802056/drinking-water-pollution-causes/