[onlyrealcuzzo]

Thousands of gallons per minute is not much on the scale of the US.

The Mississippi alone has a flow rate of almost ~6M gallons per minute.

The US uses almost ~500M gallons of water per minute.

Nestle is a pretty large user of water and if it's even 5k gallons per minute that's 1 in 100,000 gallons.

That's about how much 24,000 houses use. On the scale of the US, that's not really a lot.

Yes, bottled water is dumb. No, it is not the reason the Colorado basin is going bone dry. And if you were building a list of reasons, Nestle wouldn't even be worth mentioning.

[dralley]

1) You're taking it too literally

2) It doesn't matter if it's small on the scale of the US if it's big on the scale of individual aquifers

[JumpCrisscross]

> taking it too literally

They’re straw men. The problem is almost entirely inefficient farming. Bottled water and golf courses don’t move the needle, but they do absorb activist resources. It’s an incredibly effective rhetorical technique in a public sphere that chases shiny range-inducing factoids.

[hedora]

Nestle gets its water from all sorts of places, so in theory, the size of their global draw vs the size of individual aquifers shouldn't matter.

In practice, it does for some of their processing plants.

For instance, in Ontario, they pull water from aquifers that would otherwise go to tribes that have run out of water:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Not taking it too literally at all. GP obviously wanted to get on their soapbox about The Corporations and they were corrected / called out re the relevance of that particular rant. At a point it’s breaking HN’s rules