Bottled Water Is Sucking Florida Dry

Or just force them to use desalination. Of course, the voters will wait for the aquifer to be destroyed, and THEN pass a law saying water bottling companies can't do that.

It's not per year. It's a one time fee.

How many CCFs of water (748 gallons) are you using? In Seattle the average is 4.3 CCFs a month of water use, and most of your bill isn't for potable water, but sewer.

Watering your lawn is likely $100+ of your bill, green lawns are expensive!

I don't know much about Florida, but it shocks me that there's any need to water a lawn there. Watering a lawn must take up a lot of bottles worth of water!

I wonder if they use more water filling the bottles or landscaping around the bottling plant.

You aren't paying for the water, you are paying for the treatment of the water, and the infrastructure to get it to you. Nestle isn't using any of that treatment/infrastructure.

Don't get me wrong, I think bottled water is largely a huge waste (though it does have some uses as well, I don't think the whole industry should disappear). I just don't think this argument (that Nestle gets "free water") is compelling. These deals aren't comparable to tap water pricing, they're probably more comparable to agricultural use, and Nestle's usage is likely a rounding error in comparison (as pointed out by someone elsewhere in this thread).

> to water a relatively standard size lot

There's a big chunk of the problem.

We really need to start pushing back against "traditional" lawns. In a lot of places you're not just socially but legally required to maintain a completely unsuitable breed of grass in a condition that requires enormous amounts of both labor and water. America spends more water growing lawns than it does on wheat and corn. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/03/grass-lawns-...

You're buying it from a utility (water company) they're taking it straight out of the ground. It is an apples and oranges comparison. Most of what you're paying for is purification and the infrastructure cost piping it to your home/business, neither of which is true with groundwater.

Look, I am not defending these people, but to have a real conversation about this topic we have to at least get the facts right.

The law is outdated. It treats water the same as air. If you can get it on your property it is essentially yours. They're buying land, putting in a well-head, getting a cheap permit, and taking it straight out of the groundwater, just like a utility would.

The problem, as I said, is that the law is outdated. But if it was updated we also need to have a real discussion about farm/agriculture usage of water and what they pay/how it is distributed.

By the way in, 2017, 41% of South Florida's Water District's surface & groundwater[0] went to agriculture (1,076 million gallons). Another 41% went to the public utility (1,084 million gallons). Only 4% to industrial/commercial (116 million gallons). But yet we're talking about the 4%, not the 41%. Why is that?

[0] https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/water-supply

That's actually insane to me. Is the price just the relative cost of getting clean drinking water on the east coast of Florida? I just can't imagine ever paying that much for water. What do you do if you're poor?

That is the total amount removed from the aquifer. The article states that the amount taken from Northern Florida needs to be reduced by at least 50% in order to return to previous water levels. 1Mg/day represents .027% of the 3640Mg/day from the entire aquifer. I'm sure it represents a substantially larger percentage from the North Florida section.

Edit: It's 1Mg/day not 100Mg/day. Changed above.

Regardless, they are making money on this extraction and the state isn’t getting direct compensation. It doesn’t need to be exorbitant but it should be more than a nominal amount. There should be some volume dependence. It should be whatever the commercial water rate is.

It’s also not only a FL problem. Nestle has similar contracts with other states too.

While it may only be a small fraction of the total withdrawn, the issue should focus on the overall volume of aquifer. If the amount is decreasing then there ought to be considerations for halting non-essential usage.

writing a script in 10 minutes has virtually no impact in my life but you bet yo ass I'm charging for it

It is actually hard to imagine a manufactured product that would require less water per dollar made than bottling water.

Nobody seems to ever worry about the production of beer, wine or soda which requires an order of magnitude more fresh water per unit sold.

In fact, using this website even requires the use of water. According to the department of energy, data centres in the US will use a 174 billion gallons of water next year.

That is about 500 gallons of water per year, for every man woman and child in the US.

https://www.watercalculator.org/water-use/data-centers-water...

> Does bottled water actually get exported/shipped long distances?

Have you ever seen Fiji water?

Considering the largest offender is Nestle, I'd say yes. Bottled water here in Oregon almost always comes from California - which is a bit insane when we have so much water here locally.

I just was just given a bottle of Nestle water in North Carolina, it was from a Florida.

… and if it’s being shipped off to other places and people are drinking it, then… that’s a good thing, right? As long as it’s not being wasted. I’m a lot more concerned about people (like my kids) who take three sips from a water bottle and then throw the whole thing in the trash. Now fresh water has been completely removed from the ecosystem, at least until the plastic decomposes in ten million years.

With bottled water companies, I think people hate the plastic waste more than the water use.. so there's two reasons to go after them. Plastic bottles are the only things a bottled water company actually produces.

For wafer from an aquifer, uncertain. For water from the Great Lakes, because bottled water is shipped outside of the Great Lakes watershed, and therefore does not return to the Great Lakes.

I don't know about the political reason but the logical reason is that piped water users generally end up putting that water back into Northern Florida, either the ground or the air.

The people making the bulk of the money have the greater role in taking responsibility. It's always been like this. And by all comparisons and contrasts, buying water in plastic bottles is a losing proposition. 99% of consumers lose money by buying water this way.

It's a stupid, inefficient, and wasteful use of water.

If almond growers want to use a ton of water to grow almonds, fine. At least we get almonds, almond milk, almond oil, etc from that water usage.

Bottled water gets us nothing because most places it's getting shipped to already have clean, potable water available. It's a waste of water first and foremost. (Obviously this argument is against wealthy first world nations drinking bottled water. It's totally reasonable to ship clean water to the 2nd and 3rd world).

It's doubly offensive when you factor in the fact that most bottled water is transported in single use plastic containers that don't fall apart. There weren't any empty water bottles washed up on lakes in the 90s. They're everywhere now.

It's triply offensive when you consider this water is transported using pollution emitting vehicles.

It's 3x the waste for 1x the benefit.

The final straw is that a company is getting rich doing this but not paying for the externalities they're creating.

It's good to store a pack for cases of emergency. Even things like a broken supply water pipe on a hot sunday can be harsh, let alone local pollution warnings that last half a day or more.

Storing the tap water itself is a lot harder since you need to keep it clean enough nothing grows in there for a while; bottled water is very convenient.

Isn’t seawater infiltration directly related to depletion of the fresh water in the aquifer?

This is unfortunately the narrative that the news has forged