Water taken from Maltese boreholes is up by 24%, and nobody is even paying for it

The equivalent of an impressive 115 million bottles of mineral water (of the standard two-litre variety) gets pumped up from just four Maltese boreholes each year, statistics from the Energy and Water Agency show. Each borehole is pumping over 50,000 cubic metres annually, three of which were in excess of 60,000 cbm. The four boreholes account for a minimum of 9% of all groundwater extracted by metered boreholes, but in Malta users are still not expected to pay for extraction of water from the national water table. Altogether, there were 245 commercial boreholes in operation in 2018, water extraction decreased from 644,893 cbm in 2017 to 527,294 cbm. But another 2,873 boreholes used for agricultural purposes saw extraction increase from 1.44 million cbm in 2017, to 2.06 million cbm in 2018. Globally, it means metered groundwater extraction increased by 24% from 2.1 million cbm to 2.6 million cbm in 2018