Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]
nature.com
nature.com
You can see from this thread how powerfully a discussion is determined by the title when people do this. That's why we don't allow it. On HN, being the first (or luckiest) submitter of an article confers no special rights over the story. You don't get to frame it for others—they can and should make up their own minds. For that we need titles that reflect the content itself, not submitter spin.
If you'd like to point out what you think is important about a story, you're welcome to do so in the thread, where your opinion is on a level playing field with everyone else's. The title, though, should be that of the article or (when necessary to change it) an accurate and neutral description drawn from the article.
There's no more important single factor in making HN the substantive place we want it to be. The effect of an editorialized title is much stronger than you might think; in this case it was nearly total. I should remember this one to use as an example in the future.
I amused myself trying to find the source. The article is based from a quote from the book which is based on a study:
The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products, Twente Water Centre
http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-...
I think he is for example counting the rain and irrigation water that falls on the sugar cane that it used to make the Coke.
Quote from the book:
In 2011, in- vestigators from the University of Twente Water Centre in the Netherlands conducted a careful assessment of the total direct and indirect water footprint of a specific soda: a half-liter bottle of a hypothetical carbonated beverage sweetened with beet sugar. They based their assessment on a systematic method developed specifically for this purpose.
The result: 170 to 310 liters per half-liter soft drink. But we don’t care about half liters. We care about full liters. For that, we need to double these figures, giving us astonishing water-use ratios of 340 to 620 liters per liter of soda. The range varied with the type of sweetener and the country growing the sugar. The 620 water-use ratio applied to a soda made with cane sugar grown in Cuba, whereas the 340 ratio applied to a soda sweetened with beet sugar produced in the water-efficient Netherlands. Sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup grown in the United States required 360 liters per liter. These amounts, enormous as they seem in comparison to the prize- winning 1.4, are on the low side of water use for food production; figures for meat and dairy production, for example, are higher.
Really, the only thing wasteful would be the energy needed to pump up and distribute the water. But we get some of the most efficient farmland in return, without harming anyone (unlike e.g. the US that caused the dustbowl thanks to overly aggressive farming)
edit: also that's only when irrigation is actually needed, we get our fair share of rain.
That water is "lost" by any practical definition. For humans to use it again, it would have to be desalinated, which is expensive.
In plenty of areas where water is needed, the time it would take for the big circular arrow "water cycle" to replenish it is so long, it should be considered a finite resource.
Ars Technica had a great article about this a few years back, likening "peak water" to "peak oil": http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/05/not-just-oil-us-hit-p...
The Dutch are not master farmers, you are just in a fairly moist climate and the culture has been relatively uninterrupted due to political strength that you obtained through the plunder of the developing world. I don't think your water security is anything to be proud of. How is water security in the former Dutch colonies these days?
"In the Netherlands water pollution originating from agriculture is an important environmental concern. While recent trends indicate that the pressure from farming on water quality is diminishing, absolute levels of pollution remain amongst the highest across the OECD (Figures 2-5). Agriculture is the major source of nutrients, pesticides and the only known source of heavy metals in water. Pollution from endocrine disrupters and veterinary medicines in terms of potential impacts on human and wildlife reproductive systems is also a concern. The total external costs of agricultural water pollution are unknown, but in the late 1990s the annual external costs of eutrophication associated with nitrate emissions was estimated at €600 million (US$540 million), and for treating drinking water polluted with nitrates at an annual cost of €23 million (US$21 million)."
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07900627.2010.53...
Blue water is groundwater (1/4) and you may be able to say the same thing about it. Some blue water comes from underground acquifiers, so pumping may be bad thing if you're pumping faster than it replenishes; others is pulled up by the root system so is completely natural.
8% is grey water, water required to flush fertilizer and other pollutants. That sounds bad, but it too is often part of the natural water cycle.
Most of the problematic water usage is caused by irrigation. Sugar cane & beet can and is produced without irrigation, but doing so requires more land usage and possibly extra fertilizer. In other words, it's a matter of trade-offs.
90% of the land area used for growing corn is not irrigated (100% green water) and in this case it's no trade off. It's not irrigated because there is adequate rainfall.
In Indiana most corn fields have some movable watering things (like http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/field-irrigation-system-34543...). They don't get used much, but in a few week dry spell they might get used for a day to keep the corn alive.
Not in the US. Its corn syrup or an artificial sweeter. Curious to know if corn's water footprint is more or less than sugar beet.
I guess there's a larger issue here on how water like this isn't truly lost or in competition for human drinking water. Its part of a natural cycle of rainwater, runoff, and back into the aquifers or evaporated. A better metric is the real cost of irrigation for those farms. There are a lot of practical areas to grow corn or sugar beet. Those areas are rich in water, so its not a big deal if you use that much water for argiculture. Water heavy farming in the midwest is different than water heavy farming in California.
My guess is it varies greatly to due the source of the water. At the extreme, I would guess that desalination of saltwater to make it usable for drinking water would likely consume huge amount of water per drink unit of water.
Given that it's a pretty obvious question, find it interesting that it is not addressed; reason likely is most reporters do not do investigative journalism, but many will publish as is a story forwarded to them.
Lastly, it's very likely some water used was not drinkable to start, reused, etc. - which is to say, it's a complex topic and without a clear question and an understanding of why it is being ask, you'll always get an answer that appears to answer something.
Normal saltwater has a salt concentration of 3.5% and to be drinkable that must be reduced to 1000 ppm (parts per million); which is to say, say for 100 liters of saltwater, you'll lose at least 3.5 liters just to reclaim the freshwater itself.
Beyond that it'll depend on the system how much additional volume is lost in the desalination process; quick Google finds some systems that lose 20% of the volume per unit processed.
Lastly, your reference to energy consumption brings up an example of additional sources of water lose. Water used to cool systems, water used to clean systems, leaks/waste, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water mentions that Christchurch, NZ has a sufficient supply of pure enough water that no treatment is required. So you could probably build a passive filtration system for a one time cost. It just may not be fast enough to treat enough water if your population is too big.
Don't forget you drink the same water you bathe with. At scale it's producing a lot of water.
PS: Now a lot of water is lost after filtration by leaks/breaks in water pipes. But, that's mostly an economic choice as water is really cheap replacing pipes is expensive.
To get anywhere close to similar levels from the article you replacing there entire system every 20 years would need to take 20 * 60m * 340 = 408 Trillion gallons of water.
Just giving one number out of your hat is a dishonest persuasive move (unless everybody already knows the numbers for all the previous questions), precisely because the author knows very well that most people cannot put that number into perspective. This is not a very scientific attitude for something published in a 'scientific' journal.
At the municipal level 1 cent ~= 1,000+ gallons of water but this can vary greatly by location. As a customer in many ways you are paying for pipes not water.
PS: California farmers often pay ~70$ on average per acre foot or 325,851 gallons. But, they also get a lot of water for far less than that it's the rare edge cases that are really expensive. http://westernfarmpress.com/water-70-24-million-acre-foot
But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough. But this is another question from the previous one, that should also be discussed taking the whole picture into account.
Distilled water will also osmotically drain you, although not at any level you should be worried about. But it's not at all clear that it's "better for you" than water with stuff in it.
In the vegan world its standard to count every drop of rain that hit the livestock pasture as being used, therefore its fair to count the rain that ran off the factory roof where the pump was manufactured as used.
Wells don't dig themselves and although that doesn't happen often, it does take a lot of water to do it, and make the gear to do it, and get the diesel fuel out of the ground and onsite to run the drilling rig.
I drink every drop from a can/bottle, usually, but I am a bit wasteful in the kitchen sink and probably only half the tap water is swallowed. Not to mention my dishwasher uses 5 gallons or 10 gallons or whatever small number every time it cycles and washes my drinking cup (so my drinking cup's share is only maybe 1/2 cup of dishwasher cycle water, but, maybe I was only thirsty for 1/2 cup of water leading to 50% efficiency right there). And of course the dishwasher uses electricity (water) and detergent (water) and natgas to heat the water (contaminated fracking water).
I bet using the usual journalist sophistry techniques I could get your home sink up to 10:1 ratio pretty easy. Maybe not the hundreds to one ratio in the article, but close.
But I get your point about the entire construction of the well. And the drilling rig, say it drills 500 wells in its life span. Then you have to consider the water that went in to building the rig, divided by 500. And the water that goes in to disassembly and recycling. And the water that went in to building the drill rig factory. And that went into building the tools that were used to build the factory. Etc.
The world is insanely inefficient, and those inefficiencies are REAL even if we have been that inefficient since prehistoric time. All of the points you mention are actual opportunities for improvement, and a 1% reduction in any of them would amount to an enormous savings in water use, fuel use, increase in long term profit, etc.
For some of us, it's irritating of course: the program takes a long time due to the attempts to save water, and we have no shortage of clean water here whatsoever, so time is wasted to save water which could be wasted.
Do you have any sources for this? I have never heard a vegan claim this once.
http://www.switchurbanwater.eu/outputs/pdfs/W1-1_1-2_GEN_PAP...
My system is relatively new, but this thread has my thinking of ways I can better use that 4 gallons of waste.
Only a small fraction of it is actually drawn for drinking, but rest still has to be there. So does that rest count or not?
Fresh water is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a glass of water that you drank this morning, then excreted it over the rest of the day as urine and water vapor where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The water did not go away when you consumed it, and in this case most of the water 'used' in the production of a litre of sugar-enhanced carbonated water was never lost.
Energy is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a joule of energy when you heated up your coffee this morning, then dumped the waste heat to the rest of your kitchen, where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The energy did not go away when you consumed it, and in this case most of the energy 'used' in the production of a cup of coffee was never lost.
[I kid, I kid, I know you meant negentropy, but I just couldn't help myself.]
The trouble is just that many popular sources of energy has lot of negative effects ;-)
"Energy is about the only resource where this doesn't hold true."
Now, whether we can effectively use the energy is an entirely other question. There's plenty of technical limitations. But in a closed system there's no reason an object cannot have perpetual motion with perfect energy recovery. Of course, closed systems don't help us, because they cannot exert useful work outside of the system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing#Physical_...
All of our problems could be solved with an unlimited amount of energy applied to them. Most of them were created that way too.
With current knowledge and level of technology humanity has, we can make almost anything by applying energy to shuffling dirt. Need gasoline? We can synthesize it. Need gold? We can recycle it out of stuff. Need drinking water? We can make it out of almost anything.
All that's needed is energy, which is something we don't have much of. Last time I checked we didn't have the world full of nuclear reactors. Until we hit a sustainable and ridiculous energy abundance, we can't assume we can fix any global problem with energy - there's not enough of it to go around.
EDIT: Wording.
EDIT: Fixed wording in the original comment; I hope it's clearer now.
I think that solar and nuclear are the only sustainable power generation methods these days. The rest are either bad for the environment, or ineffective.
I can't accept the morality of handing stewardship of spent nuclear fuel to my children and their children for a thousand generations. Would you still want to be caring for a monster left to us by the people who wrote on cave walls?
As far as a DGR, I'll believe it when a nation other than Finland has shovels in the ground to actually build one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
2) What monster could be left by stone-age people to us that modern technology couldn't handle?
Modern spent fuel processing methods are great and quite safe (vitrification / underground disposal). I can't imagine a newsworthy worst case scenario with vitrified containers.
2) As long as we assume that society continues on its current trajectory forever, then yes, there's nothing to worry about. But if it's true that we're in the twilight years of US dominance or relevance as a world power, then we could be in for a significant period of upcoming political/economic turmoil.
So here's another way to look at it: How would the monks and agrarian fiefdoms of the middle ages been at handling a monster leftover by the Romans?
However, it's not _that_ dangerous. Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).
Asse II springs to my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine An old salt mine used to store low/medium radioactive waste that's under threat of collapse due to ground water. There are plans for the retrieval, but success is far from guaranteed.
Also, honestly, I don't see the point. The amount of nuclear waste we produce is minuscule compared to other equally or more dangerous chemical substances. Besides wasting perfectly good rocket fuel, destroying it this way would rob us of opportunity to reuse it in the future - hell, we already know how to reprocess some of the spent nuclear fuel for next-gen fission reactors!
One key questions for rulers and governments from antiquity is how to allow the population to gather energy to survive. It could be farming, or building oil wells and then hand out the profits or build a service economy around the oil.
I couldn't figure out how to maintain a modern population without oil (more people same amount of land) until I saw this on HN the other day https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...
Zero input food. Can be used to generate ethanol. All you need is open ocean.
Food for thought.
But we can with nuclear plants, and I'm thinking garden variety fission plants, not the always-30-years-from-now fusion ones. There are various areas where we use fossil fuels only because its more convenient - e.g. ground transportation. We can go electric with most of it. Fertilizers - I'm not sure if petroleum is a necessary chemical component or just energy delivery vector for the production process. Plastics are I think the only area where we can't easily sidestep fossil fuels. But with enough electricity we can still synthesize the compounds we need for those processes.
Or we could sit in top of our coal power plants slurping oil, wait for the magical thorium reactor and/or solar power to become another 10 times more economical.
>> "A once-through one-gigawatt nuclear power station uses 162 tons per year of uranium"
>> "World total (conventional reserves in the ground) 4.7[million tons]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
>> "The IEA estimates that, in 2013, total world energy consumption was 13,541 Mtoe , or 5.67 × 1020 joules, equal to an average power consumption of 18.0 terawatts.[3]"
One gigawatt nuclear plant uses 162 tons per year.
The world uses 18000 gigawatts per year. (40% oil, 10% coal, 15% natural gas, 35% other).
If all the fossil fuel-based energy were replaced with nuclear power, the nuclear power plants need to provide 18000 gigawatts times 65% = 11700 gigawatts.
11700 gigawatts times 162 tons of uranium is 1.9 million tons of uranium, per year.
The world's conventional reserves of 4.7 million tons will last for three years.
The 22 million tons in Phosphate deposits will last for another 10 years. (if and when methods to mine them economically are discovered)
Perhaps the seawater uranium will come in time, but as yet it is not an economical method of uranium extraction. The cost needs to be reduced by 5 to 10 times.
That doesn't follow at all. Why not?
There's plenty of sunlight in the areas with most of the people, and the areas with most of the farmland. We have storage solutions--they're still a little expensive, but they're certainly getting close.
If our current energy came from hydroelectric or geothermal could we replace it with solar? Your statement seems like a complete non sequitur.
In reality, time is the metric the matters, human time. All that stuff you talk about costs human time to build. That's why it's not being built - it's cheaper to do something else.
Once you have a robotic army capable of mining resources and building everything you want, including rebuilding itself, you can just have them throw up a bunch of solar panels and have enough energy for desalination.
A quick search for 'global aquifer depletion' yields
"Scientists had long suspected that humans were taxing the world’s underground water supply, but... major aquifers [are] indeed struggling to keep pace with demands from agriculture, growing populations, and industries such as mining." ... "The situation is quite critical" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/16/new-n...)
If someone talks about water usage (usually in a generic 'it takes X gallons to make a Y, so you should feel bad about doing/using Y' format) without regard to the specific sources then they are trying to bullshit you. If they talk about a specific source and use then keep reading to see if the rest of their argument holds up to scrutiny.
But ultimately it's the same conversation - any manufacturing of perishable / low-cost-to-weight ratio (e.g. cement is almost always produced at a factory within 50 miles of where it is used) at industrial scale is being done in a consistent, distributed way at many different locations around the country/world. If those processes damage vulnerable environments, they need to be looked at and modified.
Concrete (as well as mortar, stucco, and other such products) is made locally, both dry and wet mix. Cement is made in remote areas, typically near the limestone quarries, because the process involves large, dirty, smelly kilns.
They LOVE farming out here since there is virtually no rain or weather events to complicate things. They have everything down to a science and a tight schedule that rarely if ever changes. We use up 90%+ of the Colorado River for this one purpose. We then ship these all across the nation using more resources. Seems a bit wasteful.
So how much water to produce a head of lettuce?
Answered my own Lettuce -- 15 gallons
Chocolate (One Pound) -- 2847 gallons!!!!!
Ain't I a ray of sunshine this morning?
Also I have no idea where they are even getting this number. I think they are counting everything from rainwater that falls on the sugar beets, to the, water used by steam engines to produce electricity. But it's hard to tell because they don't explain the figure at all.
I'd drink soda.
We also can create temperature gradient by adding shade at some areas, e.g. using SO2 at altitude of about 20km.
For a bit less than 50 years I've heard continuous and constant boosterism that the burbs will migrate back into the city center. No really, this time we're serious about it, etc. Its a cliche now. However a much more interesting migration, is over the next generation or two, most of the west half of the USA will have to migrate back to the east half, assuming they want to drink water or grow plants. Its going to be interesting to watch, at least for today's younger kids to watch.
Note that the land will support some people. In 2030 the west is not going to be empty, any more than it was empty in 1830. It just won't have as many people as now.
1) The use of a (small) part of the west's capital to pipe water in from further away
2) Opportunities for multiple orders of magnitude better conservation.
3) Desalination
None of those are as easy as "just wait for rain" but as long as it's cheaper than the entire state of California ($10 trillion?) then it's not a financial hardship compared to "everyone just leave."
Sure you can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting
As a kid, I collected bottles from wherever I could find them, and returned them to get more juice, or stickers, or trading cards, or sweets. Some shopkeepers even gave you the money back in cash, rather than making you use it to buy something from them, and those were the preferred shops at which to return the bottles. When I visited Canada with family as a teenager, I diligently returned all the plastic bottles and cans I came across for the 5c refund.
Nowadays, I live in a poor part of town, and right up until Barr stopped the refund, I would see kids going around picking up Barr bottles and returning them. Whilst they were doing that, they'd usually (unprompted) pick up other bits of rubbish and drop them in the bin too, effectively cleaning as they went.
That 30p refund might not mean much to most people, but to some people, it means a lot --- and as an unintended benefit, it encouraged a certain conscientiousness and pride in the place they lived. I'm sad that they stopped it, and that's without even considering the environmental impact.
Then last week I met a man in the supermarket. We were both staring at various yogurts. I was comparison shopping; he was "spying" on the competition and the store. You see, he worked for a yogurt maker.
He asked me what I considered important and I asked him about reduced sugar variants. He said this topic came up over and over in market research. Customers demand reduced sugar. But when they do taste testing, most of those customers choose a product with mainstream sweetness. They want the idea of less sugar. But their tastebuds are not prepared for it.
Anyway, the rise of Greek yogurt at least shows that this isn't 100% true. It does need a little sugar for me to find it palatable as breakfast, but like, we're talking 2 or 3 sliced strawberries or a handful of blueberries.
For weeks. It only takes a few weeks for your sense of taste to adjust to a change in diet.
Who knows if these tests even accurately measure what people would actually buy? I remember that Coca-Cola did such tests too once...
Now, if your argument is that these full time professional market researchers can't figure out what people would actually buy...well, I thought the guy sounded extremely intelligent and well trained, and he had no reason to deceive me.
this is where there's a role for regulation to break the loop
Yoghurt drinks: UK local asian restaurants will bring you a glass of lassi, either sweet or with salt.
I do remember the water treatment plant operator working with co-workers from other countries... especially Haiti. What they told me is that in Haiti, Coca Cola's operation were really bad in wastefulness, and under the company's initiative they were trying to bring their Haiti water treatment plant in-line with Puerto Rico's.
This sounds like they're the biggest consumer, but the rest of your comment sounds more like they're the most efficient consumer?
It is not a very fair way of comparing one resource to another.
Add almonds, microchips, mining, recycling and I frankly don't understand what exactly it is you are skeptical about.
It does state that California grows most of the world supply of almonds, perhaps the number of trees being supported by the imported water is much higher than you think?
Water will be the new oil.
[1] The wikipedia article is a good place to start if you are interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination
Coffee: ~1100 liters of water per liter of coffee.
Black tea: ~270 liters of water per liter of tea.
Source: The water footprint of coffee and tea consumption in the Netherlands, http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/ChapagainHoekstra2...
Milk: ~1000 liters of water per liter
Chocolate: ~17000 liters of water per kg
Beef: ~15000 liters of water per kg
Sheep Meat: ~10000 liters of water per kg
Pork: ~6000 liters of water per kg
Butter: ~5500 liters of water per kg
Chicken meat: ~4500 liters of water per kg
Wine: ~400 liters of water per liter
Beer: ~300 liters of water per liter
source: http://www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/global...
(pdf report on the right)
Of course that wine produced in dry climate requires a lot of water.
Producing a cow, chicken or pig will take a lot of water, probably not much of a difference if animal is located at northern/southern parts or in some shed at equatorial region.
I don't understand what is misleading. Data of water pollution should be of more concern than how much water something needs to thrive.
This data shouldn't influence your decision of what to consume. Data of pollution should.
If you're worried some categories are incorrect then at least you have a lower bound there. Add the water footprint of food that cow or pig eats and then you'll get more accurate. It's no-brainer that raising 60 billion land animals yearly takes a lot of water but it's a silly statistic. The pollution of water that the process creates is more important and a much more relevant statistic.
You could just as well publish a finding that you should filter your own pond scum and boil it yourself because the potable water infrastructure costs water to produce potable water you just squander by showering yourself.
Another important point is that fresh water is neither created nor destroyed, although entropy leads to more energy being required in the entire supply chain for its consumption and in external systems to treat/move/reclaim water for other purposes (increased competition / water prices).
There's also pesticide and fertilizer runoff, deforestation and reduced rainfall (Brazil) and antibiotic resistant, pandemic disease emergence (swine flu).
Especially when they go on to talk about shell lobbying companies with dubious names, you would think they would avoid imitating...
It's not like the water is converted into pure energy and radiated into space. It is still there - some of it is locked away in the polymers in the packaging, which can be recycled, some of it is used for washing operations and is available for reuse after treatment, some of it is used to water the corn and joins the larger water cycle...
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/from-lettuce-to-beef-wh...
I have tried to contact you many times through your wrapbootstrap site, but all attempts have sadly been ignored. So, I'm going to try this route. I recently purchased a theme on your site, but I never received the download link, even though I paid for it. What are you going to do about it?
Thanks, Nicholas Marx