Bottled Water Affecting CA Water Crisis
As California continues to experience an epic drought, where residents and state officials are desperately seeking ways to conserve their water, there is one industry that feels immune; the bottled water industry. Bottled water companies are needlessly gutting California’s drinking water supply just to provide bottled drinking water to other parts of the country. Nestle, in particular, has five bottled water plants in California, and they alone siphon off over 700 million gallons of water every year!
As you can see by this graphic from Huffington Post, California is being used as a supplier for a number of bottled water companies, despite the drought and water scarcity concerns. They continue to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water for their own use, and sometimes even from a town’s municipal water supply itself. To add insult to injury, they basically pay nothing to take the water either; in a lawsuit against Nestle, the plaintiffs state that Nestle pays a meager $524.00 per year to siphon water from one creek. For a company that is worth over 247 billion dollars this is insane!
As a water treatment systems company, we understand the need for clean, safe drinking water, however bottled water is definitely not the answer. First of all, plastic bottles are not sustainable. They use massive quantities of fossil fuels and water during manufacturing and they are not biodegradable; just look at the landfills overflowing with the billions of plastic bottles Americans throw away each year.
The quality of the water in bottled water is suspect as well; many times, it is the same water that we can get from our own tap. In addition, studies have determined that bottled water can contain mold, microbes, benzene, phthalates, trihalomethanes and even arsenic, which makes it less safe than filtered tap water altogether. The even crazier part of this, is that consumers are willing to fork out over 10,000 times the cost of tap water just to drink their water from a plastic bottle.
The solution to all of this, is to invest in a good drinking water filtration system at home; no more plastic bottle waste and no more water waste from drought stricken areas. Home water filtration systems provide superior tasting water and have the ability to filter out all those contaminates that bottled water can’t. Every little bit we can do to help the environment and manage the water crisis at home will make a difference.
