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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

> Florida should prioritize providing safe drinking water for its residents, rather than bottling that water to resell elsewhere.

Does bottled water actually get exported/shipped long distances?

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> Does bottled water actually get exported/shipped long distances?

Have you ever seen Fiji water?

That is exactly why I thought most bottled water is not exported/shipped long distances: I thought Fiji was an outlier in this industry.

Are you joking? Evian. Perrier. Volvic. Massive export water brands shipped all around the world to probably every country on earth.

Those all still seem small compared to the "common" bottled water brands that you can get everywhere, which I thought were bottled relatively locally.

What common brands can you get in more places than Evian?

Most bottled water isn't shipped long distances but name brand "designer" water isn't limited to Fiji. Perrier, Voss, Evian, and Sanpellegrino are all major bottled water brands marketed in the US that send their water across an ocean.

While Fiji is a good example, it should be noted that their impact isn't as big as people think, mostly because they fill up ships that would otherwise return to the US anyway. The return trips used to be mostly empty, now they carry Fiji Water. (Yes the added weight means more fuel is burned)

> (Yes the added weight means more fuel is burned)

Wouldn't those ships require ballast anyways? It's a stability issue to be completely empty with such large displacement shipping vessels.

Good point

I just was just given a bottle of Nestle water in North Carolina, it was from a Florida.

which Florida.

Considering the largest offender is Nestle, I'd say yes. Bottled water here in Oregon almost always comes from California - which is a bit insane when we have so much water here locally.

In central Washington State, there was some recent debate over Crystal Geyser setting up a plant in Randle, WA:

http://www.nwhikers.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8029750&start...

I hadn't kept up with the story since first hearing about it from locals running a petition - Interestingly there's a peer into the negotiation tactics due to an email slip: http://www.chronline.com/news/crystal-geyser-mistakenly-emai...

https://kuow.org/stories/with-a-mistaken-email-crystal-geyse...

Crystal was working on this for a while - they were bringing in fiber optic lines into Randle months beforehand, seemed to be on the mayor's good side. The interesting thing is wondering how it riled up people that I think are right-of-center non-environmental types. I remember hearing lines akin to 'a Japanese company is coming into our town' (Crystal Geyser is "is a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese pharmaceutical company, Otsuka Holdings" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Geyser_Water_Company).

Nestle did try to build a bottling plant near hood river a few years ago. They were going to draw water from a tributary that would have affected spawning salmon and steelhead. The county passed a ballot measure that no commercial water bottling could happen in Hood River County.

I guess California does not have enough salmon to care (nobody likes the smelt :/ ), or the farms are taking so much water that bottling is paltry in comparison.

California has a very complicated relationship with water. Because most of our state is a desert, water rights are something people literally killed over until pretty recently. Strong water rights are codified into our laws, and they mostly have to do with land ownership. You own the land you own the water underneath.

It makes it really easy for Nestle to take advantage of laws written for farmers 150 years ago.

We're slowly changing the rules about water so that we don't destroy California farming but still have water left in 50 years.

The San Bernardino mountains Nestle extraction point is a federal property, though. The poor nation state cannot even govern its own water.

https://www.courthousenews.com/watch-the-water-grab-californ...

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