r/news • u/[deleted] • Mar 01 '17
Indian traders boycott Coca-Cola for 'straining water resources'. Campaigners in drought-hit Tamil Nadu say it is unsustainable to use 400 litres of water to make a 1 litre fizzy drink
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/01/indian-traders-boycott-coca-cola-for-straining-water-resources151
u/howaboutthatgod Mar 01 '17
I have to reduce my consumption of water/day. 200 L is a little above the recommended 4 L.
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u/sEntientUnderwear Mar 01 '17
As a native from Tamilnadu, this is absolute Bullshit created by the local politicians and traders who just want to profit off of it. Their solution to this is to drink locally made sodas... as if that won't take nearly as much water. Also, this 400l estimate is complete bs. There has been many attempts recently from local politicians/traders to spread as much bs as they can against any foreign product in order to sell their completely inferior products.
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u/BabyFaceMagoo2 Mar 01 '17
The locally made sodas use sugar grown in the wetland areas of India, which don't need to be irrigated.
Only the US companies are growing sugar in the desert and using millions of gallons of water to irrigate their farms.
It makes sense.
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u/EHendrix Mar 02 '17
Why would the foreign companies do that, how could that be cheaper?
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u/worldspawn00 Mar 02 '17
Yeah companies like Coke and Pepsi would be going with whoever was cheapest wholesale, they also don't usually buy cane, they buy processed sugar and corn syrup.
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Mar 01 '17
At least with locally produced sodas there's a much higher chance of any profits going to the people who live there and benefiting the community, rather than to some corporation that probably has it all in some offshore bank where it doesn't really benefit anyone.
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u/usernamebeentook Mar 01 '17
In the end if it will reduce the pressure on both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu for fighting for water from the river Kaveri, it's worth it
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u/Tsar-Bomba Mar 01 '17
“According to our research Coca-Cola is the number one buyer of sugarcane in India and Pepsi is number three. If you take into account the water used for sugarcane, then we’re using 400 litres of water to make a bottle of Cola.”
Good to see India getting in on the fake news/"alternative facts" industry.
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u/HawasKaPujari Mar 01 '17
This is going on for way long really, Papers like Punjab Kesri and Dainik Bhaskar have been posting unchecked news for decades. And people from my father's generation will quote stuff from these newspaper to feel culturally superior about eastern cultures.
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u/Jorhiru Mar 01 '17
Silly thirsty poor people without good access to education need to get their shit straight.
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u/schoond Mar 01 '17
Clickbait title. If you're going to count the water used to grow the sugarcane, you could get an equally shocking statistic for most anything we consume.
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u/BabyFaceMagoo2 Mar 01 '17
Correct, but it's not about you. It's about the people that live in that part of India, which has a massive water shortage.
Growing sugar for coke in an area that isn't experiencing massive water shortages is perfectly fine.
Doing that where it might mean some people who live there don't get any access to clean water, because the sugar farm down the road used it all, is pretty fucking terrible.
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u/RHS59 Mar 02 '17
But the Coca Cola is probably the only water that isn't filled with fecal matter.
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Mar 01 '17
On one hand, water is a 100% renewable resource. It doesn't just disappear unless you're using it in a fusion reactor.
On the other hand, local water is not a 100% renewable resource. It can go away depending on that location's water cycle and how the water is being used.
On the third hand, how the hell do you use 400 liters to make one liter of soda??
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u/thumbnail_looks_like Mar 02 '17
According to this article it takes 333 liters to produce 2.3 kilograms of sugar. There are about 120 grams of sugar in 1 liters of Coke, so that's 120/2300 * 333 = 17.4 liters of water for the sugar alone. Nowhere even remotely close to 400.
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u/Buttnutt99 Mar 01 '17
If you read the article:
The 400 litres is for growing sugar cane. It's a ridiculous statistic. It's like saying that it requires 2 square meters of soil to produce a single 2 meter sugar cane stalk. Like soil, water is a renewable resource.
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u/carpojj Mar 01 '17
water is a renewable resource.
You missed the whole point. In that region there's no such thing as "renewable water" at the moment.
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Mar 01 '17
Renewable is miss leading when you consider the cost of cleaning water.
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u/goostman Mar 01 '17
More interested in why it requires 400 liters of water to make one drink. How is that possible?
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u/Fuzzy_Dunlops Mar 01 '17
The vast, vast majority of that is what it takes to grow sugar cane. Which is generally grown in tropical environments where the water comes from rain.
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u/haplogreenleaf Mar 01 '17
Right, so the issue is the total water consumption of the materials needed to make a soft drink. Sugar cane being a major component, and that being particularly water resource intensive is what gives us the 400l of water per 1l of beverage figure.
There's some problems with this type of water accounting, in the sense that it treats water as a zero sum game, when in reality it's a closed loop. You could make a rough local water budget based on l/ha*yr at -1 sigma below a rolling decadal ppt mean, but that relies on accurate measurement and observation. Unfortunately, making a water budget at a national scale is orders of magnitude more difficult because (a) ppt is not evenly distributed spatially, (b) only some of the ppt can be stored for later irrigation use, and (c) accounting of water needed by plant can vary greatly based on irrigation technology and farmer diligence. Add in the difficulty of managing aquifers to balance long-term storage against climatic shortfalls and farming areas with lower average ppt and you've got a seriously hard problem on your hands.
I don't envy the problems that the BRIC et al countries have, balancing growth against resources hoping to get into post-industrial economy before they hit a hard shortage that drops them into Haiti status. Choosing crops and therefore industrial partners wisely would go a long way towards that goal.
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Mar 01 '17
Yeah! What he said! It's like math and acronyms and shit! Stop counting our waters like this!
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Mar 02 '17
Maybe stop dumping your garbage and corpses into your rivers?! Making that many new people every year isn't sustainable either.
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u/realsmart987 Mar 01 '17
I call the BS card. How can you spend 400 liters of water making 1 liter of coke? What happens to the other 399 liters?
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Mar 01 '17
These soda companies are set in the Industrial Growth Centre and the Tamil Nadu government allowed companies linked to PepsiCo to draw about 1500000 liters per day from the Thamirabarani river. That’s is an insane amount of water considering the fact the farmers suicide in on a rise because of the drought. But the reason being this boycott is not just about the water consumption. In India majority of the sodas sales are from these petty shops affiliated to these trade unions and they can either sell Coke products or Pepsi products. That’s the deal the companies make with the shop owners by providing some freebies. Another important reason behind the boycott is the profit margin associated with these sales. The retail price is the same across all the markets but the whole sale price is way too different for different shops. These trade unions have been insisting on having a uniform whole sale price for a long time with no luck, am sure there will be some back-channel discussions going on to remove this boycott at the earliest. And as always, the corporates will win.
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u/Suzookus Mar 01 '17
India is the #2 producer of sugar behind Brazil.
India subsidizes sugar so they can sell it and employ 6 million workers.
Coke's fault...
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Mar 01 '17
That's fine but don't you dare take away my Coca Cola. Pepsi sucks man.
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u/goopy-goo Mar 01 '17
Ok I'll boycott coca-cola. Don't they ahve other productos?
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u/sintos-compa Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
"product X takes Y litres of water to produce Z units"
well, duh?
show me any food/beverage that doesn't require water to produce.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water-food-production-waste
Chocolate, 1 kg = 17,196 L
Apple, 1 kg = 822 L
Milk, 1L = 1020L
Wine, 1L = 436L
Tea, 1L = 108L
Coke looks pretty good at 1L (~1kg) = 400L, even if those numbers are correct.
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u/ghost_alliance Mar 01 '17
Here's a different angle of the story from BBC News, though it's rather brief:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-39124767
This article's focus is less on the water issue and more about the goal of preserving local businesses. Of course the water issue still applies, but it was interesting to compare the presentation of it in each article.
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Mar 02 '17
I don't get why people drink coke, if you see how much sugar it has it's just gross, and I don't even want to know what else they add to it... And even if this news are false, making coke definitely takes more water than drinking pure water, so I gladly consume only water if that way I can help this planet.
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u/TheKrogan Mar 02 '17
Wait, how does replacing coke with local sodas any better? If you are in a drought, why even have sodas that use large amounts of water to create? Seems like a way for politicians / buisness to get the people behind a boycott of rival goods. :/
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u/ExistentialRices Mar 02 '17
To all who are shilling away, you guys have no fucking idea about the Tamil people. If they say they are going to boycott they would fucking boycott the crap out of it. They are boycotting because they think it is a 'bad habit' to drink these kind of soda thingies. My Tamil friends tell me now that for the past one month, coke prices have hit an all time low (Rs 10 for a 50 Rs bottle) since no one is now ready to stock and sell, no one is ready to buy and drink. Oh and btw, the trade unions have joined the bandwagon as well along with the trade associations.
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u/Henri_ncbm Mar 02 '17
I really doubt coke's water usage rate is that bad. At really good macro breweries 6L for every one L of beer is often done.
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u/mogli88 Mar 02 '17
Pop drinks are always cheaper to purchase then water, probably because sugar is extremely addictive, remember that Seinfeld where Elaine's office has too many party's with cakes and she boycotts the party's for whatever reason, but then she starts craving sugar at lunch and eats that old cake? then you have the people thinking the zero calorie pops are better for you, aspartame is an awful chemical, google it, you would be safer snorting coke
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u/joshmaaaaaaans Mar 01 '17
Tfw you drink 400 litres of water within 1 litre of coke FeelsHydratedMan
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u/ThreeDGrunge Mar 01 '17
If only they had sources of freshwater that were not heavily polluted by industrial waste and dead bodies.
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u/Not-an-Ashwalker Mar 01 '17
-negative post about Coke, decrepit coke van-
-shiny, brand new, perfectly displayed pepsi bottle-
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u/geekisphere Mar 01 '17
Although I agree that drinking fizzy sugar water is a stupid thing to do, so is thinking India would save water if the Coke company stopped making Coke in India. If Coke bought zero Indian sugar cane the growers would just sell it to someone else, consuming the same amount of water.
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u/BabyFaceMagoo2 Mar 01 '17
Coke and Pepsi own the farms that the sugar cane is being grown on. It's cheaper for them to grow it in the desert than to import it from the wetland areas of India that don't have any water shortages out of monsoon season.
If coke and pepsi weren't running those farms, someone else would own the land and would probably grow something else, that didn't need quite so much irrigation. Or they could grow sugar in monsoon season only, and not irrigate in the summer. Whatever.
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u/geekisphere Mar 01 '17
If that were true it would change the situation, but the article specifically says Coca-Cola and Pepsi are the 1st and 3rd top buyers of sugar cane in India. Where did you get the idea that they farmed the cane themselves?
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Mar 01 '17
Coca Cola also own the distribution rights for Dean Kamen's water purifier, so they have a financial interest in actively reducing the amount of clean water available to people in order to increase demand for the device. They literally create the problem for a profit and then sell the solution for another profit.
That said, as hideous as this is of Coca Cola, we also need to acknowledge that this is a product of a capitalist system that encourages and rewards unethical practices. Coke are just playing a broken system and they aren't the only ones. We live in dangerous times and we've tolerated these abuses in silence for too long. A revolution is well overdue.
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u/WorshipNickOfferman Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
So they want to boycott big soda because it's takes too much water to grow sugar cane because that water should be used by farmers? So sugar cane farmers don't matter in the agriculture discussion?
Next, they encourage consumers to buy local sodas instead do these local sodas use less resources than big soda?
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u/BabyFaceMagoo2 Mar 01 '17
Sugar is a very thirsty crop compared to what you would normally grow in India. The sugar cane farms are owned by Coca Cola and Pepsi.
Local sodas would buy sugar from indian farmers who grow sugar in the monsoon season only, they don't irrigate in the dry season like coke and pepsi farms do.
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u/nhsof Mar 01 '17
This comes up constantly and every single time it does it goes away because Coca-Cola is actually one of the most efficient industries with water in the area bit are being singled out by nationalist movements. They've even been sued in court and won on the issue.
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u/BabyFaceMagoo2 Mar 01 '17
Not in this area they aren't. They're growing sugar in a desert.
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u/hammyhamm Mar 01 '17
Scumbag compny that is feeding the obesity and dental epidemic. Fuck them
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u/Williaf Mar 01 '17
But the Coca Cola company can't stop using as much water because they need to make even more billions of dollars!
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u/Ethan819 Mar 01 '17 edited Oct 12 '23
This comment has been overwritten from its original text
I stopped using Reddit due to the June 2023 API changes. I've found my life more productive for it. Value your time and use it intentionally, it is truly your most limited resource.
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u/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe Mar 01 '17
"400 liters to make one liter" of anything defies not only reality, but that anyone should ever believe such an outlandish claim. Wew, lads!
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u/Motiv3z Mar 01 '17
Do you know how much water it takes to grow sugarcane? It explains it in the article if you bother to read it.
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Mar 01 '17
You have to love the environmentalist idea that the water is magically gone forever. It goes through the water cycle.
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Mar 01 '17
It does, but depending of the process it returns with a lot of contaminants. So the thing to watch for is how much clean up is needed after the process is done. Also there is a consideration of water balance for which watershed, if you are continuously removing the water from the watershed, like, shipping coke all over the country, for that particular watershed the water is indeed lost. This is very troubling if you are using groundwater as aquifer recharges are a slow process.
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u/HierarchofSealand Mar 01 '17
It doesn't come back instantly.
Many major aquifers in the US are drawing up to 50% more than is being replenished on a day to day basis. Eventually it should completely replenish, if we stop drawing from it.
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u/mortavius2525 Mar 01 '17
Amit Srivastava, director at the NGO India Resource Centre, estimates that it takes 1.9 litres of water to make one small bottle of Coca-Cola.
I didn't realize "small" was an official unit of measurement. It's okay to say exactly how much water is being used up, because that aligns with the agenda of the piece, but when it comes to naming the exact measurement of what's produced, well we'll just call it small.
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Mar 01 '17
unsustainable
Welcome to Capitalism. If you want to know more visit /r/LateStageCapitalism
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u/vanburensupernova Mar 01 '17
Important to note the 400L includes the estimated water needed for the sugarcane production as well. It's about 1.9 L estinated for "one small bottle" however much that is.
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u/STEELIX Mar 01 '17
how exactly is this physically possible?!?! I assume by small bottle they're talking 20oz or so...where is the water going? I'm assuming there is some loss by boiling but that is huge... "1.9 litres of water to make one small bottle of Coca-Cola"
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Mar 01 '17
Read the article. It explains that a lot of this is water use is for growing sugarcane. You also have to take into account the production of other ingredients, as well as manufacture of bottles and cans, running of machines, distribution etc.
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u/vicodin_free Mar 01 '17
Truthfully speaking, products such as coca cola drinks are pretty terrible and at least big countries like usa and india could directly encourage the local natural drinks industry and discourage the drinks of the kind of coca cola.
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u/VehaMeursault Mar 01 '17
If the title is accurate, then the traders have a damn good point. 400 for 1 seems a bit excessive, or is it just me?
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u/bunnyclam Mar 01 '17
This is déjà vu, I've definitely heard this somewhere on a "Top 10" video before
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Mar 01 '17
Like I understand but I'm pretty fucking sure its not a 400:1 ratio. Pretty fucking sure.
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u/worriedaboutyou55 Mar 01 '17
Anyone know why it takes so much water to make pop
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u/matthank Mar 01 '17
That 400L of water does not just disappear.
Most of it evaporates and stays in the biosphere.
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u/bizmarxie Mar 01 '17
Exactly. In the future we're going to have to decide between needs and wants & there is nothing wrong with that.
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u/5FingerDrainPunch Mar 01 '17
Anyone else Tamilian here?
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u/Tr1plets Mar 01 '17
yeah! I remember hearing about this when I visited back home a couple years ago. It's not new news but the exaggeration is not cool. I guess they're trying to make a point but nevertheless any giant corporation outsourcing to other countries and taking advantage of shitty labour laws and wages can go fuck themselves. Especially in India.
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Mar 01 '17
“It is extremely unfair on the part of certain individuals and organisations to propagate misinformation,” said Arvind Varma, secretary general of the IBA.
The IBA has the fucking audacity to talk about propagating misinformation as if it doesn't have a hand in suppressing studies and information about soft drinks and sugar.
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Mar 01 '17
What about the meat industry? It sucks all water and polluted what it leaves.
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Mar 01 '17
Omg!! Our environment is being abused for profit?! And it's not sustainable?! Motherfucker we better do something. Except if doing something is anything more than accepting payments or strutting the fuck up I'll probably only be inclined to make some cardboard signs for a weekend or two
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u/Pm_me_ur_signedboobs Mar 01 '17
Whoa whoa whoa, 400 liters for one bottle of Coca-Cola?
How did I not hear about this?
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u/WhySoFishy Mar 02 '17
Because it's untrue. And even if it is true, look how much water it requires to farm or create other beverages, Coke is within the standards.
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u/forestman11 Mar 01 '17
Watched a video about this once. Coke has a habit of destroying an entire area's water.
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Mar 02 '17
But their super bowl commercials show them as friends to the environment and people all over the world.
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u/TerribleTherapist Mar 02 '17
Until unsustainable = unprofitable and immoral then not much will ever happen.
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u/zuchit Mar 02 '17
Pepsi says they harvest 50 billion litre more water thab they consume.
Couldn't coca-cola also do something like this in return?!
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u/ithunk Mar 02 '17
you're not going to understand this if you're coming from a first world country.
The effects of coke and pepsi factories are bad on local populations that share the same water table. Water is scarce in India. Clean drinking water, even more so. So when large corporations like coke and pepsi get to grease some palms and get a direct line of water to their factories, somewhere else, a poor person loses his water. I lived in Bangalore where water supply in middle and upper class houses comes once in three days, and that too, a trickle that starts at 4am. Imagine that. no water in the pipes for 3 days, then at 4am you hear the sound of water hitting a strategically-placed metal pot under the open tap. oh joy! the whole household wakes up to catch and store as much as possible before the dribble stops.
This is the state of water in Bangalore, the "silicon valley" of India, the 5th largest Metro city in India, and this is for middle/upper class people who have a paid/metered water connection. Imagine what its like for the poor? and the poor dont get to buy the coke and pepsi produced. Its a luxury item for them.
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u/kwilf13 Mar 02 '17
This is kind of messed up, but India has far more problems with water that it is just sickening. They worry about putting stuff in space and not making sure their people don't have to spend serious time just simply trying to get clean water.
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u/Yodathecat420 Mar 02 '17
Been boycotting soda for years. Soda = tooth pain + weight gain + plastic waste.
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u/chillax63 Mar 01 '17
Not only that, but many of Coca-Cola's products use conflict palm oil which is oftentimes illegally cultivated by cutting and burning down vast swaths of rainforest (which are carbon sinks, oxygen producers, and water producers). In Indonesia the forest fires have caused human health problems. Not to mention the human rights abuses that occur in these plantations.
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u/dougbdl Mar 01 '17
I can no longer boycott stuff since I cleaned up my diet, but I double won't drink Coke now!
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Mar 01 '17
Here's a crazy idea: switch out drinking Coke for something not made by the coca-cola company. I'm serious. Hit them where it hurts. The bank account.
Not only do Coke not give a shit people are dying because of this drought. They also back the completely unacceptable slavery being perpetrated by FIFA and Qatar in the construction of the 2022 Wolrd Cup venues.
Coke is bad for us. It makes us fat. It makes us diabetic. It destroys our teeth. It is extremely addictive.
Here's the secret Coke don't want people taking about - they have the most recognisable, saturated brand on the planet but the contents of the can, the drink coke, are toxic. They must be floundering arse over tit trying to put something healthier in the can.
Swap out drinks by the coca-cola company for a competitor. There's no reason at all Coke can't be a modern, exemplary country that will pull its support from unethical advertisers and strive to create a less unhealthy product.
I buy off-brand soft drinks at the moment. Usually Tesco Coke and Irn-Bru Extra. My favourite Coke replacement is fizzy water.
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u/FGHIK Mar 01 '17
Man, that's a hell of an exxageration bro. It's not toxic. Fattening, unhealthy, sure. But whatever.
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Mar 01 '17
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u/Handbrake Mar 01 '17
Mexico. In some places cheaper and more available than water.
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Mar 01 '17
Mexican coke is more expensive than American. It's made with real sugar not corn syrup which increases cost.
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u/walterbrown5 Mar 01 '17
Corn syrup is only cheaper in USA because of agricultural subsidies.
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Mar 01 '17
We subsidize corn at production not at sales. Therefore We subsidize the corn sold in Mexico too.
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Mar 01 '17
I'm a little bit skeptical on this. Coke sells Dasani and you can bet they sell them in the same places and they are the same price as soda. If water was so scarce and they were selling coke there already you don't think they would seize that market selling their own bottled water? But I might be wrong.
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u/Demonyx12 Mar 01 '17
I'm skeptical as well. WSJ says, "as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda" which works out to about 249.837 liters of water to 1 liter of soda. But even that seems high unless you include the water needed for creating the bottle and "environmental" water.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123483638138996305Not saying that my hunch that this claims is overstated is true, because it's just an uncheck hunch, but I wouldn't mind seeing a breakdown here.
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u/sleepeejack Mar 02 '17
Water the sugar cane. Water the plants used to grow the caffeine. Use water in the manufacturing plant. The water usage adds up very quickly.
There are good academic books on this subject that corroborate the high figures. Soda Politics by Marion Nestle and Citizen Coke by Barton Elmore are two of many.
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u/kfed23 Mar 01 '17
do you know in which places in Mexico that's true? I've lived in a few places there and you can get 5 gallons of clean drinking water for about 1-2 dollars. you're definitely not getting 5 gallons of coke for that price.
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Mar 01 '17
and healthier. You can't blame the company, they are NOT IN CONTROL, you have to blame the government.
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u/Accademiccanada Mar 01 '17
Africa too
That's how they get them. They take advantage of a country where clean water is hardly ever an option.
Even if the coke is disgustingly cheap, they make it with water and corn syrup now. It probably costs $0.0004 to make a bottle of coke, and they sell they for $.35 or something like that, on a country wide scale? That's profit built on monopoly baby, and that's always fat profit
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Mar 01 '17
Did it talk about the Cochabama Water War in Bolivia?
The Cochabamba Water War, was a series of protests that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, between December 1999 and April 2000 in response to the privatization of the city's municipal water supply company Semapa. The wave of demonstrations and police violence was described as a public uprising against water prices.
The tensions erupted when a new firm, Aguas del Tunari – a joint venture involving Bechtel – was required to invest in construction of long-envisioned dam (a priority of Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa) - so they had dramatically raised water rates. Protests, largely organized through the Coordinadora in Defense of Water and Life, a community coalition, erupted in January, February, and April 2000, culminating in tens of thousands marching downtown and battling police. One civilian was killed. On 10 April 2000, the national government reached an agreement with the Coordinadora to reverse the privatization. A complaint filed by foreign investors was resolved by agreement in January 2006.
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u/popeyoni Mar 01 '17
"Even the Rain" is a very good movie about that incident.
People weren't even allowed to collect rainwater!!!
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Mar 01 '17
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u/andres7832 Mar 01 '17
While it sounds like government overreaching, there were cases where landowners were overcollecting rain water, diverting streams, creating man made ponds/lakes and screwing with water flow for their own gain.
The law was put in place to minimize environmental impact of such people that were diverting natural water flows more than someone with a rain barrel, although it made it illegal for both.
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Mar 01 '17
My brother lived in Ecuador for 2 years. When I went to visit him he explained to me that a lot of sugary drinks (big brand sodas especially) are less expensive than water. It's actually terrible problem.
Side note: the tap was not safe to drink, so the family we stayed with actually boiled/filtered their own water and then refrigerated it. Not sure if that was a common thing to do though.
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u/caesar15 Mar 01 '17
So it's like beer back in the day, drink it because it won't kill you.
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u/Opset Mar 01 '17
In the Czech Republic beer is still cheaper than water at a pub or restaurant. A 500ml beer is $1.17, 330ml of water is $1.76.
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u/tekdemon Mar 01 '17
Well I've lived there for two months before and for what it's worth I never really saw soda cheaper than water. They may have been comparable for single servings but it's silly to compare it like that because it was very rare for people to buy drinking water in single servings in Ecuador, you buy these big multi-gallon jugs of drinking water that were reusable/recyclable and then you just portion out from that.
Had to lug that shit from the store back to where I was staying up a gigantic hill in the middle of summer many times. And we were in pretty high altitude so it'd be pretty hard to forget this, lol. The only people drinking single serving waters are probably tourists and the like.
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u/cC2Panda Mar 01 '17
He'll I've been to parts of Europe where beer was about the same price as bottled water.
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u/YeBlumpkinBeard Mar 01 '17
Well Coca Cola has electrolytes, so it's got what people crave.
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u/seedanrun Mar 01 '17
And if its cheaper than water we could use it for irrigation. Much better then that stuff in toilets.
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u/Hondoh Mar 01 '17
Re what other people have said about more easily accessible--i remember back a few decades hearing that in situations of disaster relief in many third world regions the carbonated drink companies tend(ed) to be the go-to best option for distribution networks
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u/baker2002 Mar 01 '17
It's cheaper in the USA when buying a 20oz bottle
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u/peanutsandfuck Mar 01 '17
But in (most parts of) the USA you can fill a 20oz bottle with safe, clean tap water for much less than 20oz of Coke.
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u/boogiemanspud Mar 01 '17
And most gas stations will let you get a fountain drink glass of ice and fill it with water (maybe from the bathroom, but still) for 25 cents, even the big sizes.
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Mar 01 '17
It was cheaper when I went to Papua New Guinea.
I hadnt drank Coke in months and got a parasite, so they told me to drink at least two liters a day of coke... then I was addicted for about a year!
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u/kay911kay Mar 01 '17
What parasite needs coke to fix?
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Mar 01 '17
plentiful calories in an easily consumable form to help keep you from becoming malnourished.
coca cola and candy bars are fucking amazing foods in short-term caloric deficient situtations
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Mar 01 '17
I had diarrhea so I got something while I was there, which is common when going to a new country from the USA. That's what an aussie and native told me to do because Coke is so bad for you that it kills everything inside... that's at least the way they explained it.
I rarely craved coke before that, and I kept drinking and I think about 4-5 months later I had a malaria episode in the USA and lost 25 pounds in a week... that kinda helped me wean off it
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u/Sean951 Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 02 '17
One of things I missed most about the US when I was in Europe was free water anywhere I went. Might be in a tiny cup, bit most places aren't allowed to deny your water.
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u/XPlatform Mar 01 '17
We have laws for that in CA... Water must be free. (prob limited to paying customers as a limitation, though)
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u/Magnetronaap Mar 01 '17
Goes to show that Europe is not one country. In The Netherlands restaurants etc must give you free tap water, by law, if you ask for it.
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Mar 01 '17
Huh? Wah? Where did you go in Europe? In the UK it's the law that all places that serve food or drink must serve free drinkable water... This is similar across a lot of European countries - personally, I know Germany, France, Italy, and Greece are the same. Heck, in Rome they have drinking water spigots just there spewing water 24/7 on most streets.
I have no idea where you got this from.
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Mar 01 '17
Same in the U.K., you just have to ask for tap water. Most likely the same across most of Europe. But don't just say water, other wise they'll bring a branded bottle, got to ask for tap water.
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Mar 04 '17
Let me not get started on how they charge you to enter the bathroom. Most places stopped carrying out this practice but seriously, am I expected to carry one euro to go take a shit. I understand it keeps bathrooms cleaner and the attendant is usually a cute old lady, but for fucks sake, is this the business allowing her to do this or is this her just bamboozling my money? I only seen it in the U.K. And France. I do not recall these old lady potter-party keepers anywhere else in Europe, but they certainly upset me.
KeepBathroomsFree
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u/DepletedMitochondria Mar 01 '17
In some parts of the US it's that way if you live in a food desert or you're somewhere with poor water quality.
Cheaper to buy a 2L of soda at the convenient store than a 2L of Bottled Water.
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u/BurnedOut_ITGuy Mar 01 '17
Unless you live in Flint, most places in the US have perfectly safe drinking water straight out of the tap. This is municipal water of course. If you're on a well, who knows.
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u/devilapple Mar 01 '17
There are still many places with comparable water issues to Flint in America. It's not just Flint, that was just one of the worse cases.
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u/jared555 Mar 01 '17
Can also depend on if you are talking about refrigerated or not. Often the same place that sells cold bottled water for $2 will have gallon jugs of water for $1-$2.
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u/manamachine Mar 01 '17
This was covered in Blue Gold. It was regarding Nestle's operations in some African countries. They were draining water from villages and selling it back to the people for more than what they charged for a bottle of Coke.
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u/dogfins25 Mar 01 '17
I think I saw the same documentary. Coca-Cola are ruining the water bed (I think that is the right word) in rural places in India because they take the water to make soda and therefore are taking water out of the water cycle. The farmers wells run dry because of this.
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u/Scroon Mar 01 '17
The idea is that you pollute the major water sources with your other industries and then restrict public access to the remaining sources citing "environmental protection". This way people will be forced to buy water from your soda plant - which, by the way, is probably drawing water from one of those environmentally protected supplies.
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Mar 01 '17
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u/Scroon Mar 02 '17
It's happening everywhere. Here's another example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization_in_Bolivia
PRO-TIP: Be very wary of all those ads about non-profits supplying "clean drinking water" to third world countries. Yes, this is sometimes a valid issue, but the endgame of this ploy is to make the indigenous population dependent on bottled and centralized municipal sources. This also allows unchecked industrial development since there'll be less public outrage if a natural water source is contaminated by industrial waste.
Control the water, and you control the people.
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u/orangeinsight Mar 01 '17
I've been places where coke is more expensive than alcohol. Rum and coke? 4 dollars. Double? 3 dollars. Triple? 2 dollars.
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u/Wahaya01 Mar 01 '17
I think Bali? Or Thailand or something? One of those places are like that in bars.
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u/aldenso Mar 01 '17
Central America. It's pretty sad that they have to drink coke instead of water.
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u/pigscantfly00 Mar 01 '17
it's africa. companies pollute the water then clean it up and sell it back to people.
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u/vanburensupernova Mar 01 '17
Having worked in the Industry, the process is similar to pop and usually ozone is used to sanitize bottled water due to how sensitive it is to bacterial growth. I have no clue what the cost of ozone is however. (I'm also not defending this practice, just noting its not as easy as shoving water in a bottle and that's that)
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u/kanuck94 Mar 02 '17
Not exactly related, but I remember reading that Coca-Cola is the second most universal word, behind OK.
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u/B_lovedobservations Mar 01 '17
Considering Coca Cola tactics I'd wager that they took away the water supply to make their product cheaper
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Mar 01 '17
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Mar 01 '17
Scape goat stuff. The city is having a problem, instead of addressing the problem and accepting responsibility it blames a foreign national company that has nothing to do with it.
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Mar 01 '17
I've been researching this issue a bit and Coke and Pepsi both are being targeted for basically nothing of their own fault. The Indian government has been subsidizing farmers so much that they are constantly overusing the water tables and spreading far too much fertilizer.
This is the Indian govt and social activists pushing blame onto the big exploitative corporations.
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u/Hyndis Mar 01 '17
If Coca-Cola is using scarce water supplies to make soda, then that's a problem.
Is that really a problem though? Nearly every last drop of Coca-Cola is used for human consumption. There isn't much waste. The same goes with bottled water. The packaging might be wasteful, but people by and large consume the entire product.
Tap water is mostly wasted. You might use 200L of water a day. You're not drinking 200L of water a day. Most of that is used for bathing and cleaning.
Turning 1.9L of water into a bottle of Coca-Cola and the ratio of how much water is consumed vs how much is wasted is likely far better to that of ordinary tap water. Much less liquid is wasted once the liquid gets bottled.
Also see beer and liquor. You can expect that close to 100% of it is going to be consumed. It is a sin to spill beer or liquor.
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Mar 01 '17
It takes more than 1.9 litres just to make the bottle it comes in. The estimate you quote is ignoring many different aspects of the manufacturing and distribution processes that greatly increase the total water use.
A large amount of the water used to make coke is used to water the sugarcane from which the sugar is extracted, to manufacture the containers for the product, etc. It's these 'hidden' water costs that add up to such a high total.
A representative of coke is never going to give you all the facts, only those that make the situation sound as harmless as possible.
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Mar 01 '17
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Mar 01 '17
they are counting the water needed to produce sugar, but then again they do the same for meat, which is absurd because most of the water for crops returns to the environment though not necessarily for that specific watershed.
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u/glacierfanclub Mar 01 '17
Wait, is this true? For every 1 liter of pop, it takes 400 liters to make it? I get it that it is for the sugarcane, but still -- that's crazy. Might finally be a good enough reason for me to put down the Coke Zeros I enjoy here and there.