Britons consume an astonishing 3bn litres of bottled water a year, most of which is sold in PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles. Of 13bn plastic bottles sold in the UK last year, just 3bn were recycled.

As recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum feedstocks. According to Lucy Siegle, it takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) just to manufacture a one-litre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions (10 balloons full of CO2) per empty bottle. Extrapolate this for the developed world (2.4m tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year) and it represents serious oil use for what is essentially a single-use object. To make the 29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world's biggest consumer of bottled water, requires more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year…..

Which suggests you should be giving one of these eco vases to any of your friends who drink bottled water!