Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

This submission broke the HN guidelines by cherry-picking a detail from the article and using that for the title (&quot;340 to 620 litres of water are used for every litre of soft drink produced&quot;). That is editorializing, and it&#x27;s not allowed here. The HN rule says to change the original title only when it is misleading or baity (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>). We&#x27;ve changed this one back to the original, truncated to fit HN&#x27;s 80 char limit.<p>You can see from this thread how powerfully a discussion is determined by the title when people do this. That&#x27;s why we don&#x27;t allow it. On HN, being the first (or luckiest) submitter of an article confers no special rights over the story. You don&#x27;t get to frame it for others—they can and should make up their own minds. For that we need titles that reflect the content itself, not submitter spin.<p>If you&#x27;d like to point out what you think is important about a story, you&#x27;re welcome to do so in the thread, where your opinion is on a level playing field with everyone else&#x27;s. The title, though, should be that of the article or (when necessary to change it) an accurate and neutral description drawn from the article.<p>There&#x27;s no more important single factor in making HN the substantive place we want it to be. The effect of an editorialized title is much stronger than you might think; in this case it was nearly total. I should remember this one to use as an example in the future.

&gt;340 to 620 litres<p>I amused myself trying to find the source. The article is based from a quote from the book which is based on a study:<p>The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products, Twente Water Centre<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;waterfootprint.org&#x2F;media&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2011-WaterFootprintCrops.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;waterfootprint.org&#x2F;media&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;Mekonnen-Hoekstra-...</a><p>I think he is for example counting the rain and irrigation water that falls on the sugar cane that it used to make the Coke.<p>Quote from the book:<p>In 2011, in- vestigators from the University of Twente Water Centre in the Netherlands conducted a careful assessment of the total direct and indirect water footprint of a specific soda: a half-liter bottle of a hypothetical carbonated beverage sweetened with beet sugar. They based their assessment on a systematic method developed specifically for this purpose.<p>The result: 170 to 310 liters per half-liter soft drink. But we don’t care about half liters. We care about full liters. For that, we need to double these figures, giving us astonishing water-use ratios of 340 to 620 liters per liter of soda. The range varied with the type of sweetener and the country growing the sugar. The 620 water-use ratio applied to a soda made with cane sugar grown in Cuba, whereas the 340 ratio applied to a soda sweetened with beet sugar produced in the water-efficient Netherlands. Sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup grown in the United States required 360 liters per liter. These amounts, enormous as they seem in comparison to the prize- winning 1.4, are on the low side of water use for food production; figures for meat and dairy production, for example, are higher.

Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;m curious about: how much water is used for every liter of <i>drinking water</i>? It seems clear that a &quot;liter of water&quot;, which could be all kinds of polluted, is NOT the same as a liter of bottled or tap water. A liter of drinkable water has to undergo some filtration process, etc. and I&#x27;d be extremely interested in seeing how much water is used in that process. That would help put the headline&#x27;s figure in context.

You keep using this word &quot;used&quot;, I do not think it means what you think it means...<p>Fresh water is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You &#x27;used&#x27; a glass of water that you drank this morning, then excreted it over the rest of the day as urine and water vapor where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The water did not go away when you consumed it, and in this case most of the water &#x27;used&#x27; in the production of a litre of sugar-enhanced carbonated water was never lost.

I&#x27;m fairly anecdotally sure there would be a market for <i>much</i> less sweet fizzy drinks. I know I&#x27;m a weird outlier, because I dilute fruit juice with water to make it more palatable, but I think I&#x27;d really like sugary soft drinks if they had the same flavour but heroically less sweetness. My favourite soft drink is two parts orange juice from concentrate, to one part carbonated water; perhaps that&#x27;s not sweet enough for mass-market, but I&#x27;m not the only one who stays away from fizzy drinks because they find them too sweet.

I will mention the Coca Cola plant in Cayey, Puerto Rico. I consulted with them some years ago, and they were #1 in Coca Cola&#x27;s water consumption world wide. If I am not mistaken, they would &quot;use&quot; 1-1&#x2F;2 gallons of water for every 1 gallon of soft drink they produced.<p>I do remember the water treatment plant operator working with co-workers from other countries... especially Haiti. What they told me is that in Haiti, Coca Cola&#x27;s operation were really bad in wastefulness, and under the company&#x27;s initiative they were trying to bring their Haiti water treatment plant in-line with Puerto Rico&#x27;s.

My browser shows me a 2 page article with numbers pulled out of thin air. Btw 620 and 340 is very far apart. One drink uses 68 l of water for packaging and the other 124 l? I am skeptical.

340literes of water is used to produce a pound of meat. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.vice.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;meat-is-murder-on-the-climate-anyway" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.vice.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;meat-is-murder-on-the-climate-...</a>)<p>Water will be the new oil.

Is that a lot or...? Without a frame of reference I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s more than a litre of coffee or a litre of asparagus water from Whole Foods.

Assuming this is, at least in part, water that&#x27;s used for things like cooling plastics when bottles are made or rinsing machines to clean them, that number would be a simple calculation of the amount of water used per litre without taking in to account the fact that a lot of the the water in the system is recycled. A manufacturer could use the same 340 litres to make 1,000,000 litres of soft drinks, right?

How much is used to produce one litre of bottled water?

That&#x27;s a bunch of nonsense. If you calculated the water used in the production of every liter of drinking water, you would also find there are inefficiencies. It is the nature of adding value, you use more lower grade resources to produce higher grade resources. I know some of you will get an aneurysm just by reading that because you have an instinct level reaction to soft drink being described as value added, but reality simply is that a higher caloric drink that sells for higher monetary value is a higher value product than simple water.<p>You could just as well publish a finding that you should filter your own pond scum and boil it yourself because the potable water infrastructure costs water to produce potable water you just squander by showering yourself.

For reference, 1 lb (454 g) of beef requires between 3800 L and 9500 L of water. This implies a typical beef restaurant &quot;value meal&quot; demands on the order of 10000 L of water.<p>Another important point is that fresh water is neither created nor destroyed, although entropy leads to more energy being required in the entire supply chain for its consumption and in external systems to treat&#x2F;move&#x2F;reclaim water for other purposes (increased competition &#x2F; water prices).<p>There&#x27;s also pesticide and fertilizer runoff, deforestation and reduced rainfall (Brazil) and antibiotic resistant, pandemic disease emergence (swine flu).

A good case for &quot;Tax Waste, Not Work&quot;

Perhaps a bit tangential - but when things like this say &#x27;diet soda has not been shown as an effective means of weight control&#x27; it annoys me. Not because I don&#x27;t think there are serious questions are diet soda, but because the mischaracterized what diet soda is - not a weight control product but rather a zero calorie drink.<p>Especially when they go on to talk about shell lobbying companies with dubious names, you would think they would avoid imitating...

I don&#x27;t see how it could possibly be true, even RO &quot;wastes&quot; only several times the amount of water produced. Where does all the water go?

I just saw a CNBC documentary about the issue of water shortages in India and how Pepsi is at the heart of the controversy. The interesting thing was how many people Pepsi employs, but is accused of contributing to the ongoing water shortages because is their plants in the area.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;44963631" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;44963631</a>

&quot;Used&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not like the water is converted into pure energy and radiated into space. It is still there - some of it is locked away in the polymers in the packaging, which can be recycled, some of it is used for washing operations and is available for reuse after treatment, some of it is used to water the corn and joins the larger water cycle...

Chocolate (One Pound) -- 2847 gallons (10777.07 liters of Water)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treehugger.com&#x2F;green-food&#x2F;from-lettuce-to-beef-whats-the-water-footprint-of-your-food.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treehugger.com&#x2F;green-food&#x2F;from-lettuce-to-beef-wh...</a>

And all of this, for a product that has net negative nutritional value (and in some compositions, is arguably toxic).

Makes a good case to get a SodaStream.

How much water is used for a bottle of sparking water shipped to the local shop? Anyone has an idea?

Without commenting on the contents: damn, that is a nicely formatted article.

To compare it: how many litres of water needed for 1 litre water?

If It&#x27;s On The Internet, It Must Be True

tl;dr Soda wastes a lot of water drink beer instead.

What do you mean by &quot;litre&quot;? What do you mean by &quot;used&quot;? What do you mean by &quot;produced&quot;?

Sorry but I don&#x27;t believe it, it&#x27;s 90% corn syrup