Water
Water Is Now a Global Asset, and a Growing Threat
A letter from the editor of Bloomberg Green.
Bottles of Nongfu Spring Co. water at a vending machine in Shanghai. The chairman of Nongfu, a bottled-water company that's ubiquitous in China, is now richer than Warren Buffett.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
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To measure all the ways humans move our dearest commodity around the planet, researchers devised two categories of water. Physical water pools in reservoirs and comes out of the faucet. It’s wet. Virtual water, on the other hand, is the invisible history of all the H2O used to make stuff: tomatoes, solar panels, wood and almost everything else. Not necessarily wet.