Furthermore, it is not like the water is wasted. It is actual consumed by humans who live not too far from the place where the water was bottled.
In general, though, bottled water isn't consumed close to its generation point: it's packaged in plastic bottles and trucked away. There's an environmental cost. And many of the bottles that are consumed locally contain the same water people could have gotten straight from the tap, so the environmental cost is lower but more pointless.
Or equivalent to the water needed to irrigate a laughably small farm.
600 Gallons per day * 3.7 = 2,271 liters per day. That is just water without counting the water used to grow the food we use.
Meanwhile 4,000,000 liters can be benefit 4,000,000 people that drink 1 liter of bottled water a day.
Drinking water is as efficient use of water as it is possible. I rather drink from the faucet if possible but lots of people prefer bottle water.
The real problem for water scarcity, is not overpriced-as-fuck water. It will always be a tiny slice of water use, because it is overpriced as fuck. The problem is water being given away for free or nearly-free for nonessential low-value uses.
The consensus solution among water management professionals is full water pricing.
> in southern Ontario, bottled water giant Nestlé continues to extract four million litres of groundwater every day
Wow! That's like, four billion millilitres! Let's use the smallest unit of measurement we can for maximum outrage.
That's like, almost two entire olympic swimming po.. oh.
Scroll down to page 25 and look for:
"9. Human Rights Concerns about Nestlé’s ‘Pure Life’"
http://www.alliancesud.ch/en/policy/climate/downloads/nestle...
Nestle is not the sole water extractor that is causing this issue, but their business model (extract local water, bottle, mark-up, sell) is unconscionable in _this_ context. They aren't adding value, they are simply taking advantage of a developing country's weak regulatory framework.
Their business model (for this particular product) would not be immoral in an environment where access to local water was abundant.