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Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]
- lolidaisuki 11y agoI'm so glad that the file has a descriptive name.
- Yver 11y agoIs that a lot or...? Without a frame of reference I don't know if it's more than a litre of coffee or a litre of asparagus water from Whole Foods.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoWell, it's a lot compared to a litre of water ;) But indeed, a comparison to other beverages would be useful, or even a breakdown ("20% of that is from packaging"). Perhaps it's given by the high sugar content?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- morsch 11y agoPer volume of the end product, coffee is worse, black tea is better. 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/ChapagainHoekstra2007waterforcoffeetea.pdf http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/ChapagainHoekstra2...
- pitchka 11y agoAnother nice comparison: 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-food-waste-not-want-not http://www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/global... (pdf report on the right)
- neppo 11y agoas if I needed more reasons to stick with beer
- rplnt 11y agoWell this is highly misleading. Products that are measured VERY differently are grouped together.
- pitchka 11y agoJust like the statistic of sweet beverages. Of course that beers that include fish stuff require more or less water. 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.
- rwjwjuwjudf 11y agoThe higher mg caffeine / mL of coffee mitigates that a bit, probably so it's 2x as bad instead of 4x as bad.
- koralatov 11y agoReally? I don't drink coffee, but do drink tea, and I'm pretty sure that people drink them for reasons other than the raw caffeine content per ml.
- tekromancr 11y agoYea, but a lot of people use it simply as a drug delivery vehicle. Getting n mg caffeine into your system is the goal for some folks.
- evgen 11y agoYou keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means... 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.
- cpach 11y agoPerhaps it would be more illuminating to see how much energy was used to create the soft drink.
- eddd 11y agoOr how much energy is used to perform single google query.
- adrianN 11y agoThe marginal energy is probably not very much. The average energy might be significant, but it's probably dwarfed by a single can of soda if you include the can.
- spacehome 11y agoYou keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means... 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.]
- cpach 11y ago
- jtwaleson 11y agoHow much is used to produce one litre of bottled water?
- evgen 11y agoFrom that same article it mentions that 20% of the water 'used' was involved in packaging. Bottled water has the same packaging and will involve the same transportation issues, etc. The only difference is going to be in the water used to create the sweetener (sugar, corn, etc) and in those cases the water is 1) not lost, and 2) often coming from sources like rainfall over a vast area that would otherwise be unavailable to us.
- vijayr 11y agoWhat about meat? Doesn't the animal industry also use insane amounts of water?
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoIt depends on who you mean by "the meat industry" and who's doing the measuring. It's possible to have deplorable levels of inefficiency at one end and something approximating buffalo grazing on the other.
- BlackBerryBruce 11y agoWithout commenting on the contents: damn, that is a nicely formatted article.
- homero 11y agoSorry but I don't believe it, it's 90% corn syrup
- Smaug123 11y agoA can of Coke is almost entirely aluminium and water; a bottle of Coke is almost entirely plastic and water.
- colomon 11y agoHowever, the water you speak of there is, to a first approximation, one liter of water for one liter of Coke. That particular water contributes less than 1% of the water the article is talking about.
- Smaug123 11y agoI'm fairly anecdotally sure there would be a market for much less sweet fizzy drinks. I know I'm a weird outlier, because I dilute fruit juice with water to make it more palatable, but I think I'd really like sugary soft drinks if they had the same flavour but heroically less sweetness. My favourite soft drink is two parts orange juice from concentrate, to one part carbonated water; perhaps that's not sweet enough for mass-market, but I'm not the only one who stays away from fizzy drinks because they find them too sweet.
- zo1 11y agoI think a large part of the "taste" of "fizzy" drinks is governed by the amount of sugar and salt they put in it. I also dilute plain fruit juice with water as it feels more palatable, but I don't mind fizzy drinks as they're very refreshing.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoSpeaking about markets for alternative solutions, I would very much appreciate more reusability in containers. Like the Germans do with (some sizes of) plastic Cola bottles - they get refilled, not recycled. We waste ridiculous amounts of energy on making throwaway packaging. Recycling helps limit the waste, yes, but more often than not it seems like an attempt to optimize an utterly broken solution that shouldn't have been implemented in the first place.
- koralatov 11y agoIn a sad turn of events in Scotland, Barr moved away from reuse of bottles for Irn Bru and its other drinks at the end of last year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-33985022 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-33985022 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.
- johnloeber 11y agoHere's what I'm curious about: how much water is used for every liter of drinking water? It seems clear that a "liter of water", which could be all kinds of polluted, is NOT the same as a liter of bottled or tap water. A liter of drinkable water has to undergo some filtration process, etc. and I'd be extremely interested in seeing how much water is used in that process. That would help put the headline's figure in context.
- sanxiyn 11y agoQuick search gives http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/how-much-water-actually-goes-into-making-a-bottle-of-water http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/how... which is not very easy to interpret.
- nxzero 11y agoThat's bottled water, not tap water. 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.
- arviewer 11y agoHow would desalination cost water? You vaporize water, catch and cool it back to water, and there you go. The cost here is energy, which varies greatly depending on the sun.
- nxzero 11y agoUnclear how much you know about the topic, but there are a number of ways to desalinate salt water, including just mixing non-toxic saltwater with drinkable freshwater; that said, it requires 31 liters of freshwater to make one liter of saltwater drinkable. 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.
- onion2k 11y agoAssuming this is, at least in part, water that's used for things like cooling plastics when bottles are made or rinsing machines to clean them, that number would be a simple calculation of the amount of water used per litre without taking in to account the fact that a lot of the the water in the system is recycled. A manufacturer could use the same 340 litres to make 1,000,000 litres of soft drinks, right?
- eterm 11y agoYes, it would be more helpful to have a breakdown of how much of that is service water and how much is potable water.
- a_imho 11y agoMy browser shows me a 2 page article with numbers pulled out of thin air. Btw 620 and 340 is very far apart. One drink uses 68 l of water for packaging and the other 124 l? I am skeptical.
- ThomPete 11y agoSoftdrinks are only one tiny part of number of products which uses water heavily. Add almonds, microchips, mining, recycling and I frankly don't understand what exactly it is you are skeptical about.
- a_imho 11y agoSorry, I was not clear. I'm skeptical about any of the numbers being accurate. After all it is anecdotal and I think it is too general and not grasps the problem well when your precision is 340-620. No more information than some soft drink production uses twice as much water.
- PepeGomez 11y agoAlmonds? Almonds are probably the most drought resistant plant grown for human consumption, it can grow almost anywhere without irrigation. In fact, too much moisture kills its roots.
- ThomPete 11y agohttp://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-californias-water-going http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo...
- PepeGomez 11y agoIt's much less than other crops and the description says it's assuming irrigation is the only source of water, that's not usually the case. It's probably not the case with almonds at all, unless you aim for rotten roots. It's a desert tree.
- known 11y agoA good case for "Tax Waste, Not Work"
- coderdude 11y agoWhat do you mean by "litre"? What do you mean by "used"? What do you mean by "produced"?
- nicholasmarx 11y agoHi James, 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
- nicholasmarx 11y agoJames, I know you want to ignore me, but you cannot. Just refund my order through PayPal. Just do the right thing, and this will all be over. I will not rest until I get my $18, that you have stolen from me!
- knob 11y agoI will mention the Coca Cola plant in Cayey, Puerto Rico. I consulted with them some years ago, and they were #1 in Coca Cola's water consumption world wide. If I am not mistaken, they would "use" 1-1/2 gallons of water for every 1 gallon of soft drink they produced. 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.
- mapleoin 11y ago> they were #1 in Coca Cola's water consumption world wide. This sounds like they're the biggest consumer, but the rest of your comment sounds more like they're the most efficient consumer?
- knob 11y agoYou are 100% right... I messed that up. They were the most efficient. Sorry about that!
- nashashmi 11y agoThis relates more to the information found online. But I think the original article is talking about how much water it takes to produce all of the ingredients as well. It is not a very fair way of comparing one resource to another.
- PepeGomez 11y agoI don't see how it could possibly be true, even RO "wastes" only several times the amount of water produced. Where does all the water go?
- akerro 11y ago340literes of water is used to produce a pound of meat. (https://news.vice.com/article/meat-is-murder-on-the-climate-anyway https://news.vice.com/article/meat-is-murder-on-the-climate-...) Water will be the new oil.
- josu 11y agoDesalinization technology is already pretty advanced [1], and the oceans are big. I really doubt it. [1] The wikipedia article is a good place to start if you are interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination
- dexterdog 11y agoBut is it over of those things like solar and shale oil that is too expensive at current rates, but just sits in the background and enforces a price ceiling on the cheaper methods?
- ptaipale 11y agoNot really. The "used" here is quite different. The water doesn't disappear (but oil, when burned or used for other materials as plastic, really ceases to be oil).
- jay-saint 11y agotl;dr Soda wastes a lot of water drink beer instead.
- progx 11y agoTo compare it: how many litres of water needed for 1 litre water?
- wahsd 11y agoThat's a bunch of nonsense. If you calculated the water used in the production of every liter of drinking water, you would also find there are inefficiencies. It is the nature of adding value, you use more lower grade resources to produce higher grade resources. I know some of you will get an aneurysm just by reading that because you have an instinct level reaction to soft drink being described as value added, but reality simply is that a higher caloric drink that sells for higher monetary value is a higher value product than simple water. 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.
- tim333 11y ago>340 to 620 litres 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-2011-WaterFootprintCrops.pdf 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.
- Cthulhu_ 11y agoBesides which, that water isn't lost; in the Netherlands, it either sinks into the soil to eventually become ground water again (after which it's reused), or it ends up in the sea via canals and rivers. It's not like we have a water shortage in NL, not yet anyway. Besides ground water, there are several rivers passing through NL coming from the Alps, sometimes to the point of overflowing. 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.
- 11y ago
- hauschi 11y agoHow much water is used for a bottle of sparking water shipped to the local shop? Anyone has an idea?
- baldfat 11y agoChocolate (One Pound) -- 2847 gallons (10777.07 liters of Water) http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/from-lettuce-to-beef-whats-the-water-footprint-of-your-food.html http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/from-lettuce-to-beef-wh...
- at-fates-hands 11y agoI just saw a CNBC documentary about the issue of water shortages in India and how Pepsi is at the heart of the controversy. The interesting thing was how many people Pepsi employs, but is accused of contributing to the ongoing water shortages because is their plants in the area. http://www.cnbc.com/id/44963631 http://www.cnbc.com/id/44963631
- NumberCruncher 11y agoIf It's On The Internet, It Must Be True
- BFatts 11y agoMakes a good case to get a SodaStream.
- cat-dev-null 11y agoFor reference, 1 lb (454 g) of beef requires between 3800 L and 9500 L of water. This implies a typical beef restaurant "value meal" demands on the order of 10000 L of water. 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).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dmritard96 11y agoPerhaps a bit tangential - but when things like this say 'diet soda has not been shown as an effective means of weight control' it annoys me. Not because I don't think there are serious questions are diet soda, but because the mischaracterized what diet soda is - not a weight control product but rather a zero calorie drink. Especially when they go on to talk about shell lobbying companies with dubious names, you would think they would avoid imitating...
- kafkaesq 11y agoAnd all of this, for a product that has net negative nutritional value (and in some compositions, is arguably toxic).
- fiatmoney 11y ago"Used". 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...
- dang 11y agoThis submission broke the HN guidelines by cherry-picking a detail from the article and using that for the title ("340 to 620 litres of water are used for every litre of soft drink produced"). That is editorializing, and it's not allowed here. The HN rule says to change the original title only when it is misleading or baity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We've changed this one back to the original, truncated to fit HN's 80 char limit. 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.
- dustingetz 11y agoHi dang, comments like this are seen by .0000001% of your users, can we encode the rules in some moderation tools please? displaying the guidelines above the comment form would go a long way too.