Knightsbridge department Store based in London, UK is soon to start selling bottles of Svalbardi 'luxury' water for an eye-popping £80 (₦31,472.36) each. The water is harvested from icebergs off the coast of Svalbard, a group of islands between northern Norway and the North Pole.
Only 13,000 750ml bottles of Svalbardi are produced at a time. An icebreaker collects 15 tons of ice per trip, which is then melted and bottled by hand. Two trips will be made a year. The water is almost entirely free of minerals, with no nitrates or pollutants, and is unprocessed, apart from being filtered and treated with UV light. At £80 a bottle, the water costs more than most wines - and the company does its best to pitch the product in the same way.
Svalbardi claims that there's nothing wrong with selling the water at this price, and says it donates a proportion of the profits to the Global Seed Vault, which stores every variety of seed in the world as insurance against the future.
However, with United Nations figures indicating that as many as 783 million people around the world lack access to any clean water at all, many people might see it as immoral.
