Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The idea that public rights shouldn't be sold on the private market is lunacy. Nestle selling me a S. Pelagrino bottle doesn't impact an African kid getting water even a little bit. It's like arguing we should ban farming because nobody should starve.
edit:should be nearly free
Probably not possible, chemically. But imagine if you could package water and some food calories together and ship it.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40403025/this-edible-water-bottl...
In places like Brazil, street vendors sell coconuts for drinking. They cut a small hole in the top and put a straw in when you buy it. Safe to drink and delicious. The container may not be edible, but it's easily biodegradable.
Seriously, it's an acquired taste. But, what's funny is that they've been doing that forever in places like Brazil and the Caribbean. Then, several years ago, they put it in a box and imported to the U.S. etc., and it was like some brand new invention.
But, of course, for each of those bio-degradable coconut husks, we now have a handful of tiny, plastic-lined boxes.
That's entirely dependent on the type (and ripeness) of coconut, or more likely the can you're cracking. Hardly any coconut water tastes 'sickly sweet' from the fresh fruit.
Just a matter of taste.
So then you'd have to package the edible bottle in a protective layer.
It seems easier to just sell water and food separately.
That's the thing though: people wouldn't have so much issue with bottled water if the container actually was "easily consumable". As it is, bottled water is simply crime against the planet.
As for distribution of sodas, beers and other beverages - given the pattern of their consumption, it makes more sense to have them in containers than to try and make everyone's home connected to "tap beer".
Now, we can continue this topic into realms of packaging of foods and other items, and I'm going to say it up-front: I consider the modern amount of packaging on things to be a crime as well. E.g. pre-packaged meat in plastic containers vs. getting it wrapped in paper by a clerk at the meat stand.
I understand that convenience has value, and I wouldn't personally even care about this if we had a working, efficient recycling infrastructure. As we don't, I do care.
It's practically impossible to recycle plastics economically. The best we can manage at the moment is down-cycling them into low-grade, low-value plastic products. There's an argument to be made for standardised and washable glass bottles with a deposit scheme, although that's unlikely to be popular. If we're stuck with disposable containers, Tetra-pak cartons are probably better over the whole lifecycle, although the calculations are extremely complex and we don't fully understand the environmental cost of a plastic bottle.
There's an economic problem with the supply of water in public places. On a societal level, it would be vastly cheaper for local municipalities to provide faucets and drinking fountains. There'd be negligible economic cost to legislation requiring cafes and restaurants to refill water bottles free of charge or for a nominal fee.
A series of misaligned incentives has created a multi-billion dollar industry out of an extremely inefficient way of distributing water. Foremost among them is the unpriced externalities of the resources used to produce, transport and dispose of water bottles.
It's not a major issue in the broader scheme of things, but it's emblematic of a more fundamental failure in how we respond to environmental challenges.
When these fountains were removed and sometimes replaced as required by the ADA, the new fountains did not work as well. One needed two of them to have them at a low height and a high height. They seem to break often, so one could not count on getting water when one is thirsty. They usually have low water pressure or broken valves so the water comes out at a trickle. You cannot get the water your body wants without bending over awkwardly, your lips hitting the spout, and sucking on a pitiful trickle of water for minutes at a time. It is not the pleasurable experience that drinking water can be. No wonder people started looking for a bottle of water to buy when they were thirsty. I usually carry a bottle of tap water when I carry a pack, but it is more enjoyable to walk around without carrying one. When I do that and get thirsty, most of the time I buy some water, as the there are no working drinking fountains to be found.
> If you never wanted to do something that was a "crime against the planet", we'd all be living in caves.
> You can't avoid it in a modern society
There is the saying the next wars will not be about oil but about drink water.
Just 3 days ago on HN front page:
A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
339 points by colinprince 2 days ago | 157 comments
More often than not, people buying that Nestle water live in places where the tap has better scores than where the water was bottled in the first place. But for some insane reason they still choose pay a crazy markup on the bottled stuff.
If they put the collective gobs of money they are wasting on fuel, packaging, and Nestle's profits into their own water systems, they could have some kind of %99.999999 pure space water delivered straight to their taps by now.
I have no data on the reasons people purchase bottled water. But every time I've purchased bottled water it's because I was traveling and wanted to drink straight water while traveling.
I'm sure some part of the market buy spring water because it's "healthy". However, without further data I don't think it's possible to support the argument that it's a sign of "America's decline".
In fact, I've also seen bottled water sold in every location around the world I've traveled to, including areas with good tap water, and both urban and rural locations.
They draw incredible amounts of water from several systems throughout the country because people with perfectly good tap water buy cases of the stuff every week as their sole source of drinking water.
I’m not talking about “standard” water though. San Francisco gets water from snowmelt so it has noticeably less contaminants than most water supplies. It routinely ranks among the top few water sources in the United States
"You guys have the best water that we tested. Period," Snyder said of San Francisco's drinking water. "I don't think we've ever tested drinking water that didn't have any of our target compounds in it."
https://www.google.com/amp/www.sfgate.com/green/amp/S-F-s-ta...
Knew one person who found out his sewage pipes were somehow mingling with his fresh water ones this way. How that even happens, I do not know...
You say this as if it were a fact, but no evidence has been provided to support this. This is a general issue with online communities, lowers the quality of discourse, and makes it hard to come to a consensus.
So... here's one reference I found [1]. The paper tries to correlate perceived quality of local water supply and consumption of bottled water. They found that 13.4% of users used bottled water as their primary source of water. The paper contains many other interesting data points for example:
"When all other conditions were exactly equal, a respondent who was one year older in age was about 2% less likely to use bottled water as the primary source of drinking water. From a gender standpoint, the odds that a female uses bottled water for primary drinking source are 1.32 times as much as the odds for a male, with all other conditions being equal. Education level was not a significant predictor for bottled water use."
Either bottle water use decreases with age, or bottle water use is more popular among the new generations, and can be expected to increase with time. It would be useful to have data about this.
However, using bottled water as your primary source of water is still somewhat niche. I'm not sure it's a good indicator of the decline of American society, as was suggested.
Also:
> More often than not, people buying that Nestle water live in places where the tap has better scores than where the water was bottled in the first place.
The data appears to show that the majority of people buying bottled water, do not do so as their primary source of water. And are perhaps more likely just engaged in casual consumption (or while traveling etc as suggested).
b) Wrote "sole source of drinking water", not "primary source of water". They're not bathing in Nestle... yet.
c) Literally everyone I know goes through a case of the stuff every week. Anecdotal, I know. Sue me.
I'm pretty sure not everyone reads the same news sites... in any case, most new reporting is pretty poor. But referencing it, would at least provide a starting point for discussion.
> b) Wrote "sole source of drinking water", not "primary source of water". They're not bathing in Nestle... yet.
If you read the article I referenced the question as asked is "Do you primarily purchase bottled water for your drinking water?". So yes, this is about drinking water. I mistakenly assumed that was clear from the context.
> c) Literally everyone I know goes through a case of the stuff every week. Anecdotal, I know. Sue me.
Yes, this is not useful as a discussion point. If you have a link to a survey or other reference that's useful. It's possible that things have changed since the 2011 article I posted.
It makes me sad to see the waste created in the environment due to ignorance. It's common practice to use re-usable drinking containers.. and you can do this while traveling as well. It's like bringing your own shopping bag, people didn't used to do this often, but now it's become more of a trend and it's good for the environment. Now we just need to get people to realize that it's perfectly fine to re-use the same drinking container.
It's not a hard concept, it's just laziness and apathy that drive these profits.
I doubt that water filtration is particularly expensive compared to stuff like defense expenses or buying out banks.
It's more about whether a government cares about providing an egalitarian long term solution for clean water.
The US government doesn't care about black people being unjustly shot dead by police or for providing health care. Of course they don't care about something as abstract as clean water.
So in some projects where they started out with such a dual water quality setup, they have revered to only drinking water.
Seriously: I don’t think separate quality sources makes much sense. Firstly, citizens would have to be aware that there is tap water they cannot drink (where can you safely use it, and be sure kids wouldn’t drink it? Showers and garden hoses definitely are out. Farming and industry probably are the only use cases that make sense, and those already can have separate lower quality feeds, if they want it), and secondly, the effort needed to keep the streams separate and the impact of that going awry would make it difficult.
On the exit side, there is discussion about keeping runoff water separate from more contaminated water (greywater vs blackwater. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greywater, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(waste)). That already is done a bit in new neighborhoods by having separate pipes for rainwater runoff and sewage. Possible problem there is that adding rainwater to sewage helps it flow through the system. Also, again, constructors would have to conscious about never feeding blackwater into a greywater pipe.
I feel like many environmental actions that governments support are taken because they are easy, not because they have the highest impact. In your example of re-usable shopping bags, most items use more packaging that the bag itself. The environmental impact of mandating bag re-use seems minimal, compared to the packaging used for fruit, meat, vegetables, and all other common commodities.
In the case of re-usable water bottles. Yes, they can be useful no doubt. There are situations and people for whom this doesn't work well. For example, a re-usable bottle should be washed with soap once a day [1] and that might not always be possible. So suggesting that all or most users of bottled water are "lazy of apathetic" does not seem justified.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wait-youre-supposed-to-w...
Yes, targeting plastic shopping bags is easy, and yes the packaging the items come in is probably worse, but why not take the easy action anyway? What's your point?
Absolutely, it's fine and I personally feel, a great idea to use reusable bags (and water bottles).
The difficulty comes if people apply social pressure and say "why are you still using non-reusable bags that you are lazy and apathetic, and it's a sign of societies mental decline" (those are rephrased statements used elsewhere in this discussion).
Because there can be good reasons for using a non-reusable bags (or water bottles) in certain situations, and there are likely value judgments you make that have equal (or greater) environmental impact which have similar utility.
To understand it in the context of all the other things we waste gas and plastic on.
A single plane flight uses more energy than all the bottles of water I'm likely to consume in a lifetime (many times more).
So.. it seems odd to me to single out bottled water and say those people are the sign of "mental decline" and "lazy and apathetic" (as other commenters have suggested).
And what's surprising is that it feels like people are saying:
"those are they bad guys... the guys buying bottled water... buying multiple other items with equal or more packaging on a daily basis and buying smartphones, and PCs, and taking international flights, that's fine that's "justifiable"".
In my mind, if bottled water is "lazy and apathetic" and a sign of "mental decline". It's not clear that all those other things aren't too.
That, and it's not just a matter of energy. What about the litter? What about BPS/BPA leaching? What about the neglect of public systems because everyone with a little extra cash just says "not my problem" and buys a case of Nestle every week?
As far as I can tell, mostly we're arguing at cross purposes. I'm arguing that saying people who buy a single bottle of water maybe 5 times a year are "lazy and apathetic" and a "sign of mental decline" is an unreasonable and inconsistent view. This is given the other choices that most people make on a daily basis (including say, buying a phone, using electricity etc. etc.).
You're arguing... something to do with people who buy large quantities of bottled water? This is a point I'm not even disputing...
> That, and it's not just a matter of energy. What about the litter? What about BPS/BPA leaching? What about the neglect of public systems because everyone with a little extra cash just says "not my problem" and buys a case of Nestle every week?
People who buy a case of Nestle every week are a separate issue, and not what I was discussing at all (please see the thread I'm responding to). It may be possible to make a reasonable case for dissuading people from purchasing bottled water in large quantities (you might try and do that through social pressure/marketing, or taxation or some other method).
And yet, decades later everyone seems to be doing just fine.
If you're going to suggest such extreme measures are the only way to drink out of a reusable bottle, you should cite a better source than "the good housekeeping institute's youtube channel"
http://www.treadmillreviews.net/water-bottle-germs-revealed/
So it seems likely that there's bacterial buildup. But I'd be interested in further reviews, more data.
> If you're going to suggest such extreme measures
I'm not suggesting any measures (and is using soap an extreme measure?).
But it doesn't seem completely wasteful and a "sign of mental decline" to want to buy bottled water in certain situations, as another poster was suggesting. People are different, and have different requirements are priorities.
It's absolutely possible of course that we might determine that the environmental costs associated with bottled water production are too high a burden on society. And that they should be outlawed. But that's a different discussion (and obviously if this is required there are many other items that would likely also be outlawed).
In response to your platitude on the environmental impact, I assume you don't mean 'literal species extinction' because of your optimism that it will be repaired once found. So, you need to define what you mean by "too high a burden." Your opposition's argument is that it's "unnecessary" which is measurable and, in my view, not disproven in the research from the treadmill experts.
"People are different, and have different requirements and priorities" is an intellectual dead end.
Can you find a better reference? Or one suggesting that cups/bottles do not require cleaning after being used to contain only water? That seems like a testable hypothesis.
Is the burden of proof on me? I'm not suggesting any particular course of action. I'm just suggesting that it is not unreasonable to buy a bottle of water, in certain situations.
> Your opposition's argument is that it's "unnecessary" which is measurable and, in my view, not disproven in the research from the treadmill experts.
No, the treadmill tests are not hugely informative. It provides some indication that there is in some cases bacterial buildup on reused water bottles (that are not washed).
So, if you want to make an informed decision, it would be useful to have more data. It's does not currently seem reasonable to call people "lazy" or "apathetic" for occasionally consuming bottled water.
To be clear, that's the main issue. An arbitrary judgment against other people is being made without good supporting evidence.
> "People are different, and have different requirements and priorities" is an intellectual dead end.
Is it not obvious that people have different requirements? Is it hard to imagine a variety of situations where you might not easily be able to bring your own empty water bottle? Or situations in which it might be convenient to purchase water, and a container for water?
Using the logic presented here, I could easily also say that a reusable water bottle is lazy and apathetic. Because most people are near enough to a source of water that they could just wait to have a drink. They don't need to waste resources by creating yet another water container... but I understand that it might be convenient for them, and they've decided to make that tradeoff.
I did not accuse anyone of being apathetic or lazy (nether word is in my comment) but I do question the behavior because it is drastically less efficient than tap water.
My mother is anything but apathetic and lazy but has always insisted on bottled water only. I have quesioned it and my impression is that she is marketed to. It seems like a comfort food of sorts.
Of course people are different. This point brought nothing but noise to the conversation. Face palm.
This thread, and my comments, are directed toward a commenter who called people who buy bottled water lazy and apathetic (see parent comments).
> My mother is anything but apathetic and lazy but has always insisted on bottled water only. I have quesioned it and my impression is that she is marketed to. It seems like a comfort food of sorts.
That's a very different situation than purchasing bottled water occasionally while traveling. Elsewhere (see other comments) I noted that the references I've found show about 13% of people (in the US) purchase bottled water as their primary source of drinking water.
At the beginning of the thread, a poster suggested that purchasing bottled water is a sign of the mental decline of American society.
However, most bottled water is not purchased as the users primary source of drinking water. And it does not seem justifiable to call people who occasionally purchase bottled water, while traveling for example, lazy, apathetic, and in mental decline...
That's it really. Can you find a way to justify calling people who purchase bottled water lazy, apathetic and in mental decline?
Or are there other, not totally unreasonable reasons for occasionally purchasing bottled water? Or at least ones that are as justifiable as things that almost all members of society do on a daily basis (like buying other packaged goods).
> Of course people are different. This point brought nothing but noise to the conversation. Face palm.
I don't think you've read the posts I'm responding too. They argue that all people who purchase bottled water are lazy, apathetic, and a sign of "mental decline".
They don't leave any room for people being different and potentially having different requirements. They suggest that all people are capable and should be willing to carry around their own re-usable water bottle in all scenarios otherwise they are lazy and apathetic.
Yes, it's an obvious point. But... seemingly not one that is acceptable to everybody.
I am also starting to see a lot more people with the Stainless Steel insulated cups (i.e. Yeti Tumblers) than water bottles.
When traveling there are faucets at every restaurant, gas station, campsite, or pretty much any place you can think of. It's even safe to drink from the streams out in the nature.
In speaking with tourists it's clear that the main reason they buy water (and in the quantities they do) is that they just don't know any better.
In terms of energy, that plane flight likely used 1000s to millions of times more energy than that used to create a bottle of water. Running the numbers from [1] and [2], I came up with about 200 bottles of water per mile of air travel.
Was that trip necessary? What do we think of people who take an "unnecessary" flight (or perhaps a cheaper one because it takes a longer, less desirable route)? Do we consider them to be in "mental decline" or "apathetic" as other commenter have suggested.
In comparison to the flight, the bottle of water seems quite insubstantial. So if they found the water bottle more convenient in this scenario, I can't see a major objection.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2009-03-energy-bottle.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
It's best just to check in advance.
For what it's worth, I think the standards for basically all drinking water, including municipal supplies, are pretty low. Accepted levels of arsenic in ground and tap water (and probably some bottled water) are calibrated to a shockingly high tolerance for causing cancer, well above the typical target risk of one in a million.
I'm not sure you've been to Michigan. They aren't pumping this out of an aquifer.
> About 60 percent of the supply comes from Mecosta’s springs
First google result for "Mecosta springs"
> The Nestle/Perrier/Great Spring Waters of America/Ice Mountain bottling plant in Stanwood, Mecosta County, began production on May 23, 2002, extracting groundwater from the Muskegon aquifer that qualifies as a source of “spring water” under federal law.
Fresh water is abundant on the surface, yes, but it's much cheaper (and tastier) to pump water that's been purified by long filtration through the ground than to pull it from a lake or river and process it.
This process is sustainable within the state. But even if you include all the vast reserves of surface water into consideration, the ecosystem can't sustain irrigating the southwest. We have plenty of lovely farms up here; stop trying to grow crops where they don't belong!
5% of 1/80th of a single river's discharge, for the entire region. I think the parent commenter has the better argument.
From what I can tell, the plastic is a bigger concern here than the water.
That's not to say that Nestle's operations don't have local impact; apparently, large-scale pumping can disrupt nearby residential-scale wells, which is something Nestle got sued over. But Nestle isn't jeopardizing the actual aquifer or drying the area out.
For example, if I have twice the land area as my neighbor, and hence get twice the rain, and the neighborhood’s well is on my land, why would they get the same amount of water for free as I do?
Not a good argument, neither of those things are "free" because they are paid for by property taxes, which scale to many things, among them, the amount of land you possess.
(There is no such thing as "free" anyhow.)
Practically it has a cost anyway - somebody has to pay for taking it from somewhere, storing it, cleaning it, making it available. But this cost and especially the cost of the final consumer cannot be dictated by a free market - never. This would effectively mean that some people might be unable to access clean water at some point b/c they don't have enough money or no money at all.
> Pelagrino bottle doesn't impact an African kid getting water even a little bit
Actually very much - if a large corporation controls access to water effectively than this might very well be a consequence.
Michigan is not in Africa.
How many ways should I put this?
If the water was bottled somewhere close to Africa, you might be right, I guess.
In a lot of African areas Coca Cola is cheaper than clean water! Just think about the health impact.
Nestlé buys water then turns it into something trademarked and sells it. That's free market - and it's a huge shit and should be stopped.
If it really is cheaper than potable water (enough to be considered an alternative!), then I'm sure that hydration concerns come well before dietary planning concerns.
What on earth is wrong with Coca Cola producing a finished soda product at a lower cost than competing water products?
> Nestlé buys water then turns it into something trademarked and sells it. That's free market - and it's a huge shit and should be stopped.
Why should it be stopped? People buy the water, people who want the water buy it. People will buy water whether it's Nestlé's product or Coca-Cola's. If they want to buy it from Nestlé, what is your problem with that?
Food is a commodity, food is not a right; but food is a necessity. Ideally people are fed, people make a serious effort to make this happen. Water is a commodity, not a right; whether or not it is a necessity has no bearing.
When you see farmers selling agricultural products in a marketplace it must make your blood boil. To think that they would make an effort to transform the natural resources of the land into a branded product and sell it; the nerve!
what you don't get is that you have to distinguish between two prices:
- price for buying water from a source
- price for buying water in a shop
Nestlé will buy cheap water from a source - and not just part of it but pretty much all of it. then sells it overpriced as cola.
obviously if Nestlé would sell water immediately after buying from a source and just bottling it - then it would have to be cheaper than Cola (b/c of less processing).
but if Nestlé would buy all the water and just resell it - then this would be obviously crooked - the people's water source should not depend on a corporation who is bribing the elite and politicians for an exclusive access to that resource.
got it?
and to state that it doesn't matter if the primary fluid source of a human being is Cola or water and to deny health affects or downplay them - that's ridiculous.
You could also look at the situation and conclude that the most expensive parts of bottling and selling either coca-cola or water are the bottles, the water purification, the transport, and the retail labour. There is nothing suspicious about Coca-Cola and similarly-packaged water being roughly the same price.
It is not obvious that the difference between the cost of producing Coca-Cola and the price of producing bottled water is so different that they should always be sold for different prices.
Since none of us have done any actual work here, and all of us are capable of telling a good story, I'm really specifically interested in sources.
This is exactly the point I was making. What are the odds.
* The Osceola pump is supposedly hydrologically isolated from the surrounding wetlands.
* Geologically, it may be possible that the site they selected might not be isolated, and so high-intensity pumping could have a material impact on those wetlands.
* Nestle is loathe to acknowledge that geological claim and further, stipulating it, says that any impact it would actually have on those wetlands would be marginal.
* Residents claim significant impact to marshlands near their homes.
I concede based on this source that the specific siting of Nestle water pumps can have environmental impact (as I conceded up front that it can have an immediate impact on the residential water supply for well-fed houses).
I restate though my original claim, which is that Nestle stands no chance of draining the underlying aquifer from which it is pumping. It might just as plausibly set out to drain Lake Michigan. It's possible that Nestle will have to move its pumps at perhaps significant expense, to some other place in the same watershed.
That is a completely backwards way to see things. Consider this: Flint, MI had a widely publicized water crisis due to cost cutting in water treatment and supply. Due to these cost saving measures, over 10,000 children got exposed to high levels of lead. Again, I repeat: this was due to cost saving measures from a financially bankrupt city/state. At the same time this happens, companies are allowed to generate millions in profits from these very same resources?
You say Nestlé selling you bottled water doesn't impact "an African kid getting water", well excuse me but it very well does. If the state charged a fair price for the water, fair in light of the obscene profit they are set to make from processing that water, then those millions in revenue could be used, oh I don't know, to properly treat water so tens of thousands of children don't get poisoned, maybe.
Part of the reason municipalities are short on money for their water systems, is that companies get the same water (or at least, from the same watershed) for free.
Is it so wrong to ask Nestle to at least pay the same rate you and I and every other citizen pays for water? Why can't they pay municipal rates for municipal water, like Coca-Cola and all the beer breweries do.
Yes, it is unreasonable, unless Nestle taps into municipal supply like all other municipal customers.
I wonder if you would feel as strongly about citizens being poisoned as you do about corporations being made to reasonably compensate the state for the natural resources they use to line their pockets.
This specific corporation happen not to be a customer of a municipal water system, which means that that this specific municipal water system does not get to charge it.
Let me convert it into a non-abstract thing - I'm going to make an educated guess that you drink either coffee or tea. Why are you not paying for coffee or tea that you got from a place A to a municipal cafeteria that exists in the place A municipality even though you are not getting your coffee or tea there?
> I wonder if you would feel as strongly about citizens being poisoned as you do about corporations being made to reasonably compensate the state for the natural resources they use to line their pockets.
The citizens were being poisoned because the democratically elected, pro people, anti-corporation government decided that people of Flint, MI, did not need super clean water that much.
On the other hand, if Nestle did bottle Flint tap water in their product you can be the crisis would have never happened. They would own that municipal water department in all but name.
>Is it so wrong to ask Nestle to at least pay the same rate you and I and every other citizen pays for water?
This is a misconception, in Michigan at least. Flint is not short on water. They are short on functioning pipes for moving the water. Getting access to the Great Lakes' unlimited supply of water was never a barrier. That water is effectively as non-scarce as air.
If you want to go to the GL, and "BYO filtration" and suck the water out to drink, that is free for you too, just as much as Nestle.
Michigan municipalities charge for water because of the cost of filtering and distributing it, not because it's so scarce it has to throttle demand.
Nestle is profiting from the service of putting it in a bottle that you get to keep after purchasing, not from getting underpriced water in Michigan.
(California is a different story, where water is scarce, and Nestle is making that problem a little bit worse, but CA has a more general problem with sane incentives for water usage -- e.g. use-it-or-lose-it policies for farms -- that are mostly unrelated to the Nestle deal.)
I recently moved to rural midwest from the pacific northwest and have insisted on tap water my whole life, but I am now drinking bottled water in fear of what happened in Flint.
There are plenty of reasons to hate corporations, there is no need to invent crazy new ones.
> You say Nestlé selling you bottled water doesn't impact "an African kid getting water", well excuse me but it very well does.
The question, in this global world, is wether Nestle is paying the fair "International price" given that the transaction is net beneficial.
Yeah, the state might be getting less comparing to yesterday. But remember this is the 21st century and things have changed. Many businesses will just move instead of dealing with your issues adapting to the new order.
Think about it. Corps have paid taxes to government because it mainly provided infrastructure to operations and protection. If you are building your product aboard, selling it abroad, keeping the profit aboard, trading the stocks abroad (if you push WallStreet out too), etc... Why would these mega-corps still wants to pay taxes to the US gov?
Second, Nestle has nothing to do with Flint. Nestle didn't outbid Flint for safe water.
Third, Michigan is charging a fair price for water since it has such a surplus.
Fourth, there is no nexus between michigan tax revenue and african drinking water. You could use that logic on anything.
That's not what the article is saying. And you know that's not what the article is saying.
Right?
It's not a tenable position to wait for it to become scarce before taking steps. Water is a common resource and allowing indiscriminate abuse by private interests with lobbying power cannot be justified and inevitably leads to problems in future.
http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=447
https://www.quora.com/Is-San-Francisco-city-tap-water-safe-t...
(Agricultural areas often have both non-potable and potable water systems. Stanford does, incidentally. Stanford has a private water system, with Felt Lake as a reservoir. It's mostly used to irrigate the golf course and lawns.)
I can’t stand drinking tap water in the Bay unless it is ice cold.
Some bottled water tastes bad too. Getting the stuff that isn’t bottled anywhere near california always seems to taste better.
I use a 6 stage water filtration system and it is a life saver. I didn’t drink water regularly at all in the Bay until I had that. Still don’t drink much water at most restaurants here...
I’m not a defender of bottled water but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that all bottled water is equal to tap water. Especially SF tap water. It definitely isn’t. Some actually tastes decent.
[1] http://gd.image-gmkt.com/li/089/310/525310089.g_0-w_g.jpg
America != The west.
It's not something I'd buy -- the water here has an extremely high mineral content, but isn't that what people pay extra for when it's put in a glass bottle? -- but there are some available on Amazon.co.uk if you search "filter tap".
>even more curious if you would be able the distinguish it from your preferred water source in a blind taste test.
Of course you would. Tap water isn't purified in any regard to only contain hydrogen and oxygen. It's filled with all kinds of other crap with just certain crap removed.
You're right that it's regulated to be safe to drink, but safety has nothing to do with taste.
By contrast, the tap water in Seattle and many parts of the Pacific Northwest tastes excellent, about the same as drinking it directly from the springs up in the mountains whence it came. Consequently, people rarely drink bottled water in that region; you can't materially improve the flavor of what comes out of the tap.
While some of the difference is in the local mineral balance, which can be quite unpleasant in some locales (e.g. in close proximity to active volcanic areas in the mountain West), in most regions the unpleasantness comes down to the chemical treatment required to make the water safe based on the default quality of the watershed.
There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally-damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better for them.
If Nestle didn't have such a lucrative market to fleece, Nestle's profits would be far less impressive.
You can blame someone for being stupid, but you can't blame them for being ignorant after soaking in loads of bullshit throughout their lives. Blame the ones spewing the bullshit.
When I was in Stockholm I remember seeing some sort of artsy indicator of water/air quality that runs 24/7 right on the public boardwalk. We need something similar in every town - a constant feed of water quality and ppm measurements, perhaps with a bit of crowdsourcing thrown in, similar to what Wunderground does with weather.
This. I only drink bottled water. I just have very hard times trusting water which has been flowing in pipes. It may be irrational, but we're talking about a substance we drink every day. It's tough to overcome irrational fears about it.
There is a plant not too far from here. It's too long to get into tonight, but quite a few people are unhappy with the deal that was made with Nestlé. Rumors abound about corruption, bribery, and dishonesty.
It's a small town so I'm not sure what will have made it into the newspapers, but the town is Kingfield, Maine. Some of the people are pretty unhappy.
Water? I cook with it, but what I drink is generally milk.
It always seems odd that bottled water gets trashed a lot more than bottled soda, when soda is both worse for the consumer's health, and probably has a higher environmental footprint (since it's not just the water, but the water plus whatever sweeteners and chemicals get added).
True, soda doesn't taste the same as tap water, but bottled water doesn't taste the same as tap water a lot of the time, either. Some people also prefer the convenience of buying a bottle of water, and it would seem strange to say: "Hey, it's fine to buy something in the bottle if you're doing so for the flavor, but if you're doing so for the sake of convenience, that's terrible."
You'll find plenty of people arguing against sodas in threads that talk about soda, this one, however is about the water, no one is suggesting that soda is a better alternative.
Another reason people might buy a bottle of water is because of convenience - if someone's taking a long drive, for example, it's easier to buy a bottle of water at a gas station and drink it periodically than pull over every time they want to drink.
The reason I bring up soda is because there's sometimes less animosity towards soda than bottled water. Some schools will even ban bottled water, but allow bottled soda[1] - naturally leading to an increase in the less healthy option.
[1] http://grist.org/article/plastic-water-bottle-ban-leads-to-u...
When I go for a drive, I take a refillable bottle with me, and generally fill it up at the hotel in the morning. Though I will admit to buying a bottled water from time to time.
But I don't think that a significant percentage of the 50 billion water bottles sold every year are going to people that don't have convenient access to tap water.
If we all know that tap water in many cases isn't the equivalent of filtered water, or that tap water can vary from location to location, why do these conversation invariably always start by pretending that there's no difference between bottled water and water straight from someone's tap?
My parents have a well and when they were concerned with their water they subscribed to a water delivery service that dropped off reusable 5 gallon bottles every couple weeks that is still orders of magnitude better than individual bottles. (Each 5 gallon bottle replaces 40 16 oz bottles and is refilled)
One of their neighbors installed a big (200 gallon?) water tank and hired a service to refill it. My parents ultimately ended up installing a filtering system when it became clear that the well wasn't going to get better. Which would have been cheaper that the water deliveries long term, but less than 2 years later the city ended up bringing municipal water to their neighborhood.
There are lots of more environmentally friendly alternatives to single serve bottles.
> Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy production, the bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage
Right. So all this stuff about water shortages, the amount of water being used, the amount being charged for the water is meaningless. The entire article is pointless.
(I also loved the way they tried to blame Pakistan's poor infrastructure on Nestlé.)
If it's worth more than that, maybe the agency selling permits should charge more. It's hardly Nestle's fault if they paid the required fee for their use.
Unless you're growing rice in a paddy I guess?
I buy bottled water as a drink on the go. I'm perfectly happy drinking tap water that's been bottled. If I've got the choice between a fizzy drink or water, I usually prefer water, thanks.
When I was a kid in the 80s there used to be public water fountains, now there aren't. I think we're all a little more germ paranoid these days too, so i doubt people would even use them if given a choice to buy a bottle of water for a £1 or use a fountain for free.
I mean the guy argues against himself:
Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy production, the bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage
The only thing I wish was better was that it wasn't plastic bottles, but I always recycle them if I can.
And when we buy bottled water, we aren't really buying water. We're buying some combination of marketing and convenience.
[1] I only have east and west coast experience
Not an authorised unit. See: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-conv...
1 Buck Pal area is roughly equal to 3.706 MicroWales, 77,000 sq m, 19 acres or 19 football (soccer) pitches.
In any case, the difference between a cake with arsenic and a cake without arsenic is going to be significantly less than 1%, but I'm going to make my decision based on that less-than-one-percent.
For health reasons. They're very rarely criticized for their environmental impact, when they're impact is almost certainly greater than bottled water (since they're not just water and a plastic bottle, but water, a plastic bottle, plus sweeteners and additives).
Some schools have banned bottled waters but allowed bottled soft drinks.
Tap vs. bottled water is more perplexing because it's basically the same thing in both cases. It's more like going out of your way to go to a paying park instead of going to the one next door even though they're basically the same.
I hardly drink any soda by the way, so it's not like I'm arguing that they have great value.
I don't have a water tap in either place, so it's not an alternative.
For a long time, I've wondered whether a filtration system in every home would change people's water consumption habits: would people still buy bottled water despite having superior-quality water available from a tap? As the expression goes-- You can lead a horse to water but you can't teach it to drink.
http://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/19/health/fluoride-iq-neurotoxin-...
Meanwhile, our internal organs are getting nicely calcified like a bright, shiny american dental association smile.
Unless you are talking about pineal calcification, of which there doesn't seem to be much in the way of provable negative consequences within normal ranges and is indeed mostly mentioned by new age psychedelic gurus.
And I'm not sure why we should assume fluoride is the main culprit for any of this. But sure, there's a dose-response curve for just about everything.
Jennifer Luke found that in gerbils, high fluoride hastened female sexual development and was associated with a diminished circadian rhythm.
Even if fluoride levels in water are "fine" (as in "deal with it.") for most people, its mass medication and there are likely people who are adversely affected by it. It's absolutely unnecessary.
https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/em-guerra-contra-a... (pt-BR)
Episode one is about liquid gold: bottled water.
Nestlé is just one of them, Coca Cola is another one.
But it is very relevant.
Privatization of public access routes is logically equivalent to privatization of natural resources, and there's no fair way to justify either, there's just the historical application of violence and subsequent commodification.
But commodification of the commons is approximately as relevant to the concept of a free market as markets for slaves... which is to say not at all, and actually contradicts it.