Meanwhile Nestle is pumping thousands of gallons per minute out of aquifers to put into plastic bottles.
The Mississippi alone has a flow rate of almost ~6M gallons per minute.
The US uses almost ~500M gallons of water per minute.
Nestle is a pretty large user of water and if it's even 5k gallons per minute that's 1 in 100,000 gallons.
That's about how much 24,000 houses use. On the scale of the US, that's not really a lot.
Yes, bottled water is dumb. No, it is not the reason the Colorado basin is going bone dry. And if you were building a list of reasons, Nestle wouldn't even be worth mentioning.
2) It doesn't matter if it's small on the scale of the US if it's big on the scale of individual aquifers
They’re straw men. The problem is almost entirely inefficient farming. Bottled water and golf courses don’t move the needle, but they do absorb activist resources. It’s an incredibly effective rhetorical technique in a public sphere that chases shiny range-inducing factoids.
In practice, it does for some of their processing plants.
For instance, in Ontario, they pull water from aquifers that would otherwise go to tribes that have run out of water:
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...
Also, according to these people - https://foodprint.org/blog/plastic-water-bottle/ - it takes over 5 liters of water to make one bottle.
The "alfalfa in the desert" stuff you hear about isn't for salads. It's feed for cattle.
A gallon of milk requires [edit](4-5 gallons excluding consumption for growing feed, ~800 gallons, contested, fully realized)[1, 2] and a pound of beef requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 gallons. [3]
Beef is where the water goes, not Nestle water bottles, which are silly too. You drink about 185 gallons of water per year, meaning 1 pound of beef consumes 10 years worth of your personal drinking budget. Assuming you drank every single drop out of a Nestle water bottle, it really does round to zero compared to agriculture.
[1] https://www.watereducation.org/post/food-facts-how-much-wate...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092652/volume-of-water-...
[3] https://www.watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-...
30 to 60. million. grazers. Roaming the countryside, eating and pooping and fertilizing our soil. Remember when the US had some of the most fertile, nutrient-rich soil in the entire world? Remember how perfectly balanced our ecosystem was before we ruined it?
The issue is not ruminants. It's everything else we've done to this planet throwing everything life carefully manicured into disarray.
It's probably relevant in order to provide some kind of scaling factor. :)
Saudi Dairy. All that alfalfa grown with groundwater in the desert is shipped to a country that banned growing alfalfa with groundwater in the desert.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90963878/arizona-is-evicting-a-s...
So that would be 6,000 gallons of water to make 1 Gallon of Almond Milk... that seems to be more than your 800 Gallon figure for cow milk....
Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...
> Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner.
Also not relevant, but ok. I'll make a note of it.
Personally, I think meat should just be much more expensive, representing the actual consumption of resources in its production. That way we could just let the market sort it out.
However, we grow almonds in areas that don't have enough water, and milk is often produced in areas with surplus water.
Either way, I prefer soy milk.
Are you at all concerned about hormone imbalances?
When the govt. starts subsidizing, the market cannot sort it out, or at least that is how I’ve seen things play out. I’m not a market expert by any means.
2) If you truly cared about this and weren't just using it to justify your milk consumption, why wouldn't you switch to a far less water intensive milk like soy milk?
Worse. It's feed for Chinese cattle in China. Alfalfa is shippable, and it gets shipped to the Chinese mainland. Economically speaking, alfalfa and water are pretty fungible, one's as good as the other, and they're buying it up subsidized by the US government to the detriment of American taxpayers. If we taxed alfalfa sold abroad to make the price reasonable, that nonsense would stop immediately.
Very few people have to drink Nestle’s products.
As for why people are in business, they are in it for profit. The only way they make a profit is if people want to buy their stuff. There's nothing shameful about it.
And Nestle’s water quenches folks’ thirst. They’re both wasteful. Only one is significant.
In the same way that taking a private jet and walking somewhere both "move people".
To quote another study [2] on the issue.
>Agriculture accounts for 92% of the freshwater footprint of humanity; almost one third relates to animal products. ... >In the western countries, the WF of meat can be reduced by changing consumption, requiring a transition in the present nutrition pattern and a reduction of food wastes. Obviously, the WF of the livestock sector is only one of the concerns to be taken into account. Other factors include animal welfare, food security, public health concerns and environmental issues other than water, like contribution to emission of greenhouse gases.
It took a while for me to come to grips that I needed to change food comsumption to only non-animal products. Way to many reasons. Maybe comments on threads like this can slowly change other people as well. We need compounding changes to really make a difference.
[0] https://www.watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120001666638282817 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221237171...