> I'd need some evidence that 1.1 million gallons is a drop in the bucket As I said, 1 million gallons of water evaporates from Lake Michigan every 10 seconds.

> I'd need some evidence that 1.1 million gallons is a drop in the bucket As I said, 1 million gallons of water evaporates from Lake Michigan every 10 seconds. That’s the deal: where water is abundant, it’s really abundant. Almost all of the cost of municipal water, for example, is from building and maintaining the distribution system. In non-arid areas, there almost never is any shortage of water at the source, and water pricing is priced per use not because it costs that much to “produce it” or because the reservoirs are running short, but rather to limit the use so that there is no need to expand water carrying infrastructure. If Nestle is building its own infrastructure, and the water is so abundant that there is absolutely no risk of it running anywhere close to short, why should the government or people care? Suppose Nestle builds a farm of windmills, that slows down a million gallons of moving air by 20 miles per hour every day. To be sure, they would be using up large amounts of natural resource, the wind energy. Should they pay significant fees for the privilege? I don’t think so; that would be completely ludicrous. There are of course circumstances where Nestle should pay more. For example, if they were using water coming from government built and maintained infrastructure, or if the water was not so abundant as it is in Michigan. For example, if they were pulling it from deep aquifer that’s depleting faster than its refilling, as it is the case in many places of arid Southwest. But, to my knowledge, none of this is the case for Nestle in Michigan.