[Freakinoldguy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Nestle built a huge water bottling plant here in Sacramento and even though we're in a drought and every water user (business, personal, and municipal) are supposed to reduce water usage by 25% Nestle is exempt.

Don't let the bastards into Canada.

Far to late.

[PluggyRug]

This pic sums up the mentality of bottled water drinkers.

[OnTheIce]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Nestle pays the people of Ontario a royalty of $3.71 per million litres of groundwater they remove, which is almost the price that it sells a bottle of just one litre back to the same people.

Do the math - That is a ONE MILLION times mark-up. Whoever says government (a Liberal government nonetheless) isn't busienss-friendly should give their head a shake. There's no way a private wholesaler would let another company mark-up their product by 10,000%. The wholesaler would instantly jack their prices to get a bigger cut of the action.

The whole bottled water business is racket - they take groundwater or even municipal water at heaveily subsidized or ridiculously low rates for next to nothing, keep all the profits, and burden uss with the litter and recycling of the empty bottles (not to mention the pollution associated with production and transportation and recycling).

And the general public, ignorant to the world as they usually are, will have a shit fit if they can't have ther bottled water, for what they think is a "cheap" price.

Not much of a business man, are ya?

The cost of the product goes well beyond just sucking it from a lake or source. There's filtration, bottling, packaging, delivery, infrastructure, sales, etc, etc. The costs extends well beyond the cost to get the water itself.

[BeaverFever]

OnTheIce OnTheIce:

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Nestle pays the people of Ontario a royalty of $3.71 per million litres of groundwater they remove, which is almost the price that it sells a bottle of just one litre back to the same people.

Do the math - That is a ONE MILLION times mark-up. Whoever says government (a Liberal government nonetheless) isn't busienss-friendly should give their head a shake. There's no way a private wholesaler would let another company mark-up their product by 10,000%. The wholesaler would instantly jack their prices to get a bigger cut of the action.

The whole bottled water business is racket - they take groundwater or even municipal water at heaveily subsidized or ridiculously low rates for next to nothing, keep all the profits, and burden uss with the litter and recycling of the empty bottles (not to mention the pollution associated with production and transportation and recycling).

And the general public, ignorant to the world as they usually are, will have a shit fit if they can't have ther bottled water, for what they think is a "cheap" price.

Not much of a business man, are ya?

The cost of the product goes well beyond just sucking it from a lake or source. There's filtration, bottling, packaging, delivery, infrastructure, sales, etc, etc. The costs extends well beyond the cost to get the water itself.

Of course they do but YOU must not be much of a businessman if you think one million times mark up is normal. Do you think nestle would sit by if some grocery store was able to sell at one million times wholesale? Of course not they'd demand a piece of the action.

Shocker that OTI is here to defend the status quo yet again. You need a superhero costume. It's a bird, it's a plane, its STATUS QUO DEFENDER! No cop too corrupt! No partnership too private! No corporation too greedy!

[herbie]

$1:

No cop too corrupt! No partnership too private! No corporation too greedy!

That's why its still known as the "American Dream". Because it ain't so pretty if you're awake.

[BeaverFever]

herbie herbie:

$1:

No cop too corrupt! No partnership too private! No corporation too greedy!

That's why its still known as the "American Dream". Because it ain't so pretty if you're awake.

Because you've got to close your eyes to believe it

[OnTheIce]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Of course they do but YOU must not be much of a businessman if you think one million times mark up is normal. Do you think nestle would sit by if some grocery store was able to sell at one million times wholesale? Of course not they'd demand a piece of the action.

It is normal!

This has been going on for as long as bottle water has been around and it appears, you just noticed!

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Shocker that OTI is here to defend the status quo yet again. You need a superhero costume. It's a bird, it's a plane, its STATUS QUO DEFENDER! No cop too corrupt! No partnership too private! No corporation too greedy!

I'm not defending anything...I've known about this for ages...just funny to see you work your 'liberal math' on a business transaction.

[BeaverFever]

OnTheIce OnTheIce:

[

It is normal!

This has been going on for as long as bottle water has been around and it appears, you just noticed!


I'm not defending anything...I've known about this for ages...just funny to see you work your 'liberal math' on a business transaction.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

What I'm saying is that the bottled water business, which has mostly only been around since the 1990s, rips off the public. I haven't " just found out about it".

Your argument seems to be based on nothing other than defending the status quo. To you, the way things are is defensible simply on the basis that it is the way things are. Fuck if you lived in 1860s youd be defending slavery. Just another "business transaction" that you've known about for ages which makes it ok.

There is nothing normal, routine, or standard about giving away a public resource at one millionth its retail value.

[OnTheIce]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

OnTheIce OnTheIce:

[

It is normal!

This has been going on for as long as bottle water has been around and it appears, you just noticed!


I'm not defending anything...I've known about this for ages...just funny to see you work your 'liberal math' on a business transaction.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

What I'm saying is that the bottled water business, which has mostly only been around since the 1990s, rips off the public. I haven't " just found out about it".

Your argument seems to be based on nothing other than defending the status quo. To you, the way things are is defensible simply on the basis that it is the way things are. Fuck if you lived in 1860s youd be defending slavery. Just another "business transaction" that you've known about for ages which makes it ok.

There is nothing normal, routine, or standard about giving away a public resource at one millionth its retail value.

My point was you looked at just the cost of extracting the water and calculated that and only that into the profit margin. You didn't consider all the other expenses these companies have, like the ones I mentioned above, into the equation.

It's not a rip off if the public is overwhelmingly purchasing the product. A product we don't have to purchase but we do in epic quantities.

The market has shown an overwhelming desire to purchase water in bottles. It's not the fault of Nestle, etc for purchasing water at pennies on the dollar nor is it there fault for the overwhelming demand. If they're paying too little, perhaps the cities, towns, etc need to charge more.

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

There is nothing normal, routine, or standard about giving away a public resource at one millionth its retail value.

Beyond the fact that is is normal, routine and standard, the public resource doesn't come pre-filtered, bottled and delivered to stores. You may not like it and you might hope that the status quo will change....but it won't. If you're mad at the price they pay, it's not the fault of the companies, it's the fault of the people allowing them to pay so little.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

My point was you looked at just the cost of extracting the water and calculated that and only that into the profit margin. You didn't consider all the other expenses these companies have, like the ones I mentioned above, into the equation.

Because it's not relevant to what is being discussed here. What's relevant is that their entire business model - in fact the entire industry - is based on privately selling a public good that costs so little, the government is basically giving it them for free. The government shouldn't be giving it away for free.

If you want government to respect taxpayers and start acting like a business, as you so often claim you do, then government should be charging a fair market price. Do you think if nestle found out that a beverage distributor was selling nestle products at 1 million times what he was paying for them,they wouldn't jack up the price? Do you think they would care if he say "but but I have business costs of my own!" No, they wouldn't.

$1:

It's not a rip off if the public is overwhelmingly purchasing the product. A product we don't have to purchase but we do in epic quantities.

Give your head a shake. The taxpayer is being ripped off. It is not the job of the Province or the taxpayer to subsidize bottled water or any other frivolous good just because it's popular.

$1:

It's not the fault of Nestle, etc for purchasing water at pennies on the dollar nor is it there fault for the overwhelming demand. If they're paying too little, perhaps the cities, towns, etc need to charge more.

It's everyone's fault - the companies and the governments. They should charge more - a lot more - if they even allow it at all.

$1:

If you're mad at the price they pay, it's not the fault of the companies, it's the fault of the people allowing them to pay so little.

As I said, it's everyone's fault.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

Groundwater is mostly non-renewable, study finds


Less than 6% of groundwater is replenished within 50 years


The water that supplies aquifers and wells that billions of people rely on around the world is mostly a non-renewable resource that could run out, a new Canadian-led study has found.

While many people may think groundwater is replenished by rain and melting snow the way lakes and rivers are, underground water is actually renewed much more slowly.

In fact, just six per cent of the groundwater around the world is replenished within a "human lifetime" of 50 years, reports University of Victoria hydrogeologist Tom Gleeson and his collaborators in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience today.

That water tends to be mainly found within a few hundred metres of the surface, where it is most vulnerable to being contaminated by pollution or depleted by higher temperatures and reduced rainfall as a result of climate change, the researchers found.


"Groundwater is a super-important resource," Gleeson said in an interview with CBC News. "It's used by more than a third of the world's population every day for their drinking water and it's used by agriculture and industry."

More than a third of the Canadian population relies on groundwater, including the entire population of P.E.I. and some fairly large urban centres such as Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph in Ontario, Gleeson added.

Because groundwater is so important to billions of people around the world, Gleeson and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Calgary, and the University Gottingen were interested in finding out how much groundwater there is in the world and to get an idea of when it will run out.

Nuclear clues

Scientists had previously made a rough estimate of the amount of groundwater in the world, but no one knew how much is renewable and how quickly it's replenished.

Gleeson and his colleagues came up with a way to figure out what groundwater was less than 50 years old. In the 1960s, during the Cold War, a number of countries were doing above-ground nuclear testing. This introduced a radioactive form of hydrogen, called tritium, into the world's water supply.

The researchers figured that groundwater with high levels of tritium was renewed since the 1960s. Groundwater with negligible levels was older.

By looking at 3,500 measurements of tritium in groundwater from 55 countries and using computer models to trace the flow of groundwater around the world, they were able to estimate how much groundwater was young and renewable and how much was older.

They also confirmed the total quantity of groundwater around the world using a variety of data like the permeability of rock to the flow of water and how much water could be stored in different places, based on how porous the rock there was.

A look at previous estimates of total groundwater showed the crude calculations were not far off.

"When we actually went back and traced what the actual calculation, it was literally two lines of text that someone could do at a bar," Gleeson said. "But the amazing thing was that they were right."

His team came up with almost exactly the same number.

Plentiful but finite

They estimated that the total amount of groundwater in the world was 22.6 million cubic kilometres — enough to cover all the land on Earth to a depth of 180 metres. The amount that was renewable was no more than 1.3 million cubic kilometres or less than six per cent. But the researchers said that was likely an overestimate due to the types of rock in the areas where most of the measurements were taken. Correcting for that suggested that the actual amount of groundwater renewable within 50 years was likely only 0.35 million cubic kilometres, or enough to cover all the land on Earth to a depth of just three metres.

The good news is that the amount of renewable groundwater on Earth is quite large —- three times larger than all other fresh water contained in lakes and rivers on Earth, the researchers reported.

But it isn't evenly distributed. There was less groundwater, especially younger groundwater, in more arid regions.

Gleeson said in places like California and the U.S. Midwest, people are already using "non-renewable" water that is thousands of years old and in places such as Egypt, they're tapping into water that may have last been renewed a million years ago. Such old water isn't just non-renewable — it tends to be saltier and more contaminated than younger groundwater.

In addition, overusing groundwater, either old or young, can lower subsurface water levels and dry up streams, which could have a huge effect on ecosystems on the surface, Gleeson added.

He hopes the study will help remind and motivate people to manage their groundwater resources better. "And realize that it's finite and a limited resource that we need to respect and manage properly."

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/technology/ ... -1.3318137

[Jabberwalker]

Aquifers may, for the most part, msy be a one time, non-renewable resource that we are chewing through at a rapid rate.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/earth-running-out-water-aquifiers/396152/