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Water should have a cost when it is scarce, but water isn't scarce in Michigan. It should be free. Complaining about bottling water in Michigan is like complain

• em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  agreed. In fact we should be celebrating water bottlers for providing utility for humans by transferring water from where it is plentiful to where it is actually scare, in an easily consumable container.
  • daveguy 9y ago
    Now, if it was in an easily consumable container, that would be something to celebrate. Probably not possible, chemically. But imagine if you could package water and some food calories together and ship it.
    • shrumm 9y ago
      this has been done/ tried. someone's already made an edible water bottle http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/04/12/edible-water-bottle-could-put-end-plastic-packaging/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/04/12/edible-wate... - the issue is scale. No new startup can hope to match the scale and distribution the larger companies have. I think the best case scenario is for the likes of Nestle to see these new packaging types as a good investment to boost sales and start adopting them too. Hopefully the more eco friendly options could also be produced in 25 seconds!
    • Pinckney 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_water_bottle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_water_bottle
    • sjwright 9y ago
      > Probably not possible, chemically https://www.fastcompany.com/40403025/this-edible-water-bottle-is-how-youll-drink-in-the-future https://www.fastcompany.com/40403025/this-edible-water-bottl...
    • horsecaptin 9y ago
      You mean like a melon but one that holds large quantities of water?
      • semi-extrinsic 9y ago
        Coconut. 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.
        • unclebucknasty 9y ago
          Delicious if you like sickly-sweet, salty water. 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.
          • YeOakAye 9y ago
            > Delicious if you like sickly-sweet, salty water. 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.
            • unclebucknasty 9y ago
              Jamaica. Straight from the fruit. Just a matter of taste.
    • BurningFrog 9y ago
      If the bottle was edible, other organisms than us would eat it before we got to it. So then you'd have to package the edible bottle in a protective layer. It seems easier to just sell water and food separately.
      • maccard 9y ago
        Maybe not edible then, but biodegradable - that should do. There's a company in the UK called VegWare[0] no affiliation ) which produces biodegradable food packaging. - most of the "artisan" food stores in my city now package their products in it. 0- https://www.vegware.com https://www.vegware.com
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > in an easily consumable container 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.
    • refurb 9y ago
      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.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        There's a difference between what's necessary, and what's just profiteering off damaging the environment. In a world where civilized countries can ensure quality drinking water in their taps, bottled water should be relegated to disaster relief and "transferring water from where it is plentiful to where it is actually scare".
        • njarboe 9y ago
          I almost always drink tap water but I would say it is better for people to drink bottled water than bottled sugar water. Should we ban sodas? Beer?
          • TeMPOraL 9y ago
            It is, but the health issues are a completely separate discussion. 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.
• frik 9y ago
  Nestle and Coca-Cola have many sub-companies that bottle water from wells and ship them around the world with a big (2000+% mark up). 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15283928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15283928
• BuffaloBagel 9y ago
  Huge differences in tap water quality in Bay Area. Contrast pure SF city water sourced from run-off from Sierra granite to salt-laden water pulled from the Sacramento River delta in Contra Costa County.
  • asteli 9y ago
    Even within Alameda county I've noticed huge differences. Oakland's tap water is great -- similar to SF's, yet Fremont has to deal with weird mineral-laden tap water.
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  What if we throw out the whole political angle? Where's the outrage--from an engineering perspective--of this just being a f___ing stupid wasteful example of America's decline? 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.
  • new299 9y ago
    There is another reason for buying bottled water, and that's because tap water in a convenient container is not available... 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.
    • jstewartmobile 9y ago
      If people were only buying it as a convenience, it would be a non-issue. But it is an issue. 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.
      • UsernameProxy 9y ago
        How do I know if I have good tap water?
        • mrgordon 9y ago
• sytelus 9y ago
  Your analogy is misguided. Fresh water is indeed a limited resource. Just because you have it in plenty, it doesn't mean that commercial entity is incapable of drying it out thin. And once it's gone, it might not be back for few hundreds or even thousands years. Look up on internet about upcoming crisis for drinkable water. Any natural resource extraction should be regulated properly. For bottled water companies should pay the cost of plastic pollution as well.
  • hueving 9y ago
    >Fresh water is indeed a limited resource. Just because you have it in plenty, it doesn't mean that commercial entity is incapable of drying it out thin. I'm not sure you've been to Michigan. They aren't pumping this out of an aquifer.
    • xapata 9y ago
      But the Great Lakes aren't exactly pristine. Pure(ish) water isn't really that abundant there.
      • jdietrich 9y ago
        Many of the big bottled water brands are reverse osmosis filtered and UV sterilised - Aquafina and Dasani definitely are, as is Nestle Pure Life IIRC. Water sources with low total dissolved solids are preferable for cost reasons, but it isn't much of a problem if the water source is dirty or brackish.
    • ineptech 9y ago
      Fifth sentence of the article: > 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.
    • awful 9y ago
• throwawayswede 9y ago
  jesus christ, do you work with nestle by any chance!
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  I never understood why a market scheme for water, pursuant to which every household gets the first N gallons every month free, where N is more than what most families consume, and where everything past N is set at auction (or some other market mechanism), is not feasible. It literally only requires large water consumers (and businesses) pay a bit more and throws a bone to most voters. It also, finally, stops treating water as an infinite good.
  • fleitz 9y ago
    That's because you don't understand that 'large water consumers' are generally known as farms. Try f'ing with the farm lobby.
  • throwaway613834 9y ago
    Not the answer to your question, but this scheme still wouldn't really be ideal since it wouldn't encourage "normal" users to conserve water.
  • Someone 9y ago
    “Universal basic water”, so that would lead to similar discussion (on a smaller scale) as “universal basic income”. 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?
    • freshhawk 9y ago
      Same reason they get the same amount of police and firefighters for free as you do I would think. The shifting from one norm to the other is the entire point of the argument.
      • jerf 9y ago
        "Same reason they get the same amount of police and firefighters for free as you do I would think." 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.)
• oeuviz 9y ago
  The issue is not that water is bottled somewhere where there's plenty of it and then shipped somewhere else but that water companies, especially Nestlé, are buying local sources in regions poor on drinking water only to save on transportation/logistic costs, conclusively taking away a previously free water source from local people and putting a price tag to a product that was previosly free - without having any benefit as it is still the same water as before.
• blubb-fish 9y ago
  > Water should have a cost when it is scarce 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.
  • microcolonel 9y ago
    > 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.
    • blubb-fish 9y ago
      Nestlé is a global corporation. So you have to look at it from a global perspective instead of narrowing down your focus on some random city in the US. It's an attack at humanity not just on Michigans.
      • microcolonel 9y ago
        But Nestlé extracting fresh water in Michigan is not depleting the fresh water supply of any place in Africa, right? Water scarcity in another region of the world is not a reason to reduce or stop extraction in Michigan. How many ways should I put this?
        • blubb-fish 9y ago
          There is a direct connection from Michigan to Africa - its name is Nestlé.
  • icelancer 9y ago
    >>Actually very much - if a large corporation controls access to water effectively than this might very well be a consequence. If the water was bottled somewhere close to Africa, you might be right, I guess.
• awful 9y ago
  In fact water may become scarce there, by relative vs absolute measures. The area depends on water to supply the massive natural streams and rivers and lakes and marshlands. These waters flow all the way to the Great Lakes and help keep those waterways and everything downstream refreshed. Water reduction could dry out huge swaths of wetlands ecosystem and affect water life. This is exactly why they are studying the river water levels to make sure it doesn't. That's like saying because you live near an ocean, there is plenty of water around. Not hardly.
  • tptacek 9y ago
    Can you find a source backing up this argument? The sources I've found suggest that this is very unlikely given the amount of groundwater available in Michigan.
    • awful 9y ago
      A lot of groundwater in Michigan, but in that very place the groundwater meets surface, everywhere. It supplies vast areas of marshland and swamp and huge ecosystem that surrounds it. If you reduce the pressure by pumping aquifer and groundwater (a lot of sand there), will it divert the groundwater from replenishing the surface, that is the wetlands, the rivers, and the lakes that all this wildlife depends? Measurement is needed, and undergoing as I understand. BTW, Mich is so varied because of its unique geological history; across the state underneath it is like very different places 10s to 1000s of feet below, from sand to granite to salt domes, many different types of technical soils(?) IIRC. PS No, there may be, but if there were reliable studies it would not be so controversial.
      • tptacek 9y ago
        I understand the logic. I'm asking if you know of a source documenting that actually happening in Michigan. I know that high-volume pumping apparently disrupts the neighbors wells, but the same source I read that in said that it wasn't disrupting the ecosystem. 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.
• gamad 9y ago
  Also, it's not "free". Nestle builds buildings, pays taxes, employs labor, invests in infrastructure. It's like saying "Intel sells chips for $1,000 that are made from 20 cents of raw materials! And there's kids starving in Africa"
• andrepd 9y ago
  No. 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.
  • jandrese 9y ago
    I don't see how the Flint Water Crisis is connected to Nestle. That was a political decision from the government reeling from the fallout of the loss of US car manufacturing in the area. The company wasn't stealing the town's water as far as I know.
    • maxsilver 9y ago
      > I don't see how the Flint Water Crisis is connected to Nestle. 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.
      • notyourday 9y ago
        > 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.
• kafkaesq 9y ago
  The idea that public rights shouldn't be sold on the private market That's not what the article is saying. And you know that's not what the article is saying. Right?
• throw2016 9y ago
  Every human knows water is usually a scarce and valuable resource and needs to be taken care of. 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.