We have plenty of water on the surface. Most of it is in the ocean. While that is not fresh water, it is where bassically all non sequestered water will end up. The limiting factor of fresh water is the how quickly the water cycle can produce it, which does not decrease if some water gets sequestered somewhere.

To the extent that net water in the water cycle is relevent, we would have the opposite problem where we are introducing far more water that had been sequestered (mostly in the form of glaciers), causing sea levels to rise. It would be great if we could find a way to sequester all of that extra water; but even putting a dent in that would nake carbon sequestration look trivial.

Better start damming rivers too, we don't want all that fresh water sequestered in the ocean where it becomes unusable due to salt contamination.

Why would that 'terrify' you, out of interest?

- ed : are you thinking that microbes and germs and whatnot might lie there dormant until they're dug up again, unleashing some plague on unsuspecting descendants? If so, I imagine the chemicals leeching from the plastic will kill or retard their essential survival/replicative mechanisms...

If underground water of that scale that terrifies you, go google "aquifer" some night when you don't want to sleep.

No, this is silly. The amount of water that human beings package for drinking is a tiny fraction of the amount we use for agriculture, which is itself an absolutely miniscule fraction of the amount of fresh water that cycles through the environment constantly (itself, of course, a tiny fraction of the water available in oceans).

Amounts of water aren't the problem. There will always be water. When people complain about water, it's not about how much there is in any one place, it's about flows: how much of this or that river basin or aquifer is being diverted for human use, potentially causing side effects like lake drying or desertification downstream. Those are important effects that need to be managed.

But Dasani bottles in land fills aren't hurting anyone.

Even if every bottle used this year was buried full, it would only be 0.06 cubic miles of water. Earth's lakes alone have about 20,000 cubic miles of fresh water, while there are millions of gallons of fresh groundwater.

Of all the things to be terrified by, why water being sequestered in bottles?

Sounds like you live in a water scarce region (e.g. the southwest). If so, think about moving if water scarcity disturbs you, because there will be a lot more of that in the upcoming decades -- the problem is the number of people trying to live with the same finite resource.

Water is plentiful in many areas of the earth. Where I live, it was common just 20 years ago for sinks to just have continually flowing pipes with no faucets, since the water was diverted from streams or springs that just flow into the sea anyway. This rainy season we've had well over 200" of rain.

I've thought about this too, but tbh the water sequestered in bottles should be nothing compared to what gets pushed under the mantle during tectonic plate movements, and the amount that falls into essentially unreachable and unknown aquifers.

Also in the long run that water will be squeezed out of those bottles by pressure and degradation, so I don't think that's too much to worry about.

I think about this and drain any water bottle i pickup before either recyling or trashing them.

When you realize that a little bit of water in each bottle adds up to significant leakage from trash bags, what doesn't leak increases transport weight, and then what isn't lost landfill will live for ages (if not ruin the landfill liner over time)

If anything, it would be good if we could lock up a few ocean-inches of water to offset sea level rise.

One ocean-inch of water is 2200 cubic miles. It will never happen.