‘Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and you could say the same for Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Drinking fountains have faced a challenge from bottled water, but they seem to be making a comeback. By the way, we throw away over 60 million PET water bottles every day in the U.S. alone.
One day, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall decided to divest itself from a particularly dirty form of coal extraction in Germany, so it advertised that its mines were for sale. It would get an offer from a totally unexpected party. At Vattenfall’s lignite mines in Germany, enormous excavators had for years been clawing at mounds .