Car washes, laundries and bottlers benefit from free water

These numbers emerge from a breakdown provided to MaltaToday by Konrad Mizzi's Ministry for Energy and Water Conservation.

Although all these establishments are metered, so far none of them pay for their water, and the country is still in the dark about the amount of water they consume.

"This is mainly due to the inaccessibility of the premises when there were attempts to read the meters," a Ministry spokesman explained.

When asked whether the various premises will start paying for their water supply, the Ministry spokesman replied that he is committed to launching a national water policy initiative in the coming weeks.

From the data compiled from just 70 non-agricultural boreholes, it is estimated that 0.4 million cubic metres are extracted annually by the entire non-agricultural sector.

This figure is an extrapolation and may not match the true amount.

Although the 237 boreholes provide a fraction (around 1%) of the water extracted annually in Malta, the estimated amount alone would be equivalent to more than 200 million bottles of mineral water a year.

The Water Services Corporation will be installing radio frequency modules on these boreholes within the year so that readings will be forthcoming on a regular basis.

Non-agricultural boreholes represent only 3% of the total, and while they are all metered, most agricultural ones have yet to be.

So far 1,150 agricultural boreholes have been metered, which, combined with the non-agricultural 237, means that only 17% of all boreholes in Malta are metered.

In November 2011, former minister George Pullicino gave a May 2013 deadline for the installation of meters on all agricultural boreholes. Originally the deadline was the end of 2010.