Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

In rural Mecosta County, Mich., sits a near-windowless facility with a footprint about the size of Buckingham Palace. It’s just one of Nestlé’s roughly 100 bottled water factories in 34 countries around the world.

ILLUSTRATION: SILJA GÖTZ FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

Inside, workers wear hairnets, hard hats, goggles, gloves, and earplugs. Ten production lines snake through the space, funneling local spring water into 8-ounce to 2.5-gallon containers; most of the lines run 24/7, each pumping out 500 to 1,200 bottles per minute. About 60 percent of the supply comes from Mecosta’s springs and arrives at the factory via a 12-mile pipeline. The rest is trucked in from neighboring Osceola County, about 40 miles north. “Daily, we’re looking at 3.5 million bottles potentially,” says Dave Sommer, the plant’s 41-year-old manager, shouting above the din.

Silos holding 125 tons of plastic resin pellets provide the raw material for the bottles. They’re molded into shape at temperatures reaching 400F before being filled, capped, inspected, labeled, and laser-printed with the location, day, and minute they were produced—a process that takes less than 25 seconds. Next, the bottles are bundled, shrink-wrapped onto pallets, and picked up by a fleet of 25 forklifts that ferry them to the plant’s warehouse or loading docks. As many as 175 trucks arrive every day to transport the water to retail locations in the Midwest. “We want more people to drink water, keep hydrated,” Sommer says. “It would be nice if it were my water, but we just want them to drink water.”

Read the Bloomberg Businessweek story By Caroline Winter - “Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For.”

People who don't have children benefit our environment more than any campaign – it's time to celebrate them

Kim Cattrall famously said
that she didn't want to
be referred to as "childless"
 as she found the term offensive. 

The global population is growing rapidly, while the resources we depend on to live are dwindling. If you consider the footprint each person makes on the world – in terms of food and water consumed, electricity and gas used, and waste produced – the challenge of improving living standards while protecting natural resources and the environment is striking. The question of human population size is fundamentally one of sustainability, and in that so is the choice to have children.

Rather than being taboo, being childfree is something that should be celebrated and valued. The childfree do more for our environment than any campaign. In the UK our electricity use per capita is 5,407 kWh – it’s nigh on impossible to make up for the environmental footprint of having a child by remembering to switch off the lights. Finite resources mean we must consider our consumption now, what living standards are acceptable, and how to maintain the ecosystems on which we depend and how many of us there are.

Read the story on the Independent by Simon Ross - “People who don't have children benefit our environment more than any campaign – it's time to celebrate them.”