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Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

I'm dubious about the numbers as well, but this article tries to do a full calculation of water usage for a .5L bottle of Coca Cola produced in the Netherlands: https://www.waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/CocaCola-TNC-...

It concludes that each .5L bottle requires 35L of water as input. The majority of this is from the water required to grow sugar beets, which comes primarily from natural rainfall. Obviously, India is not the Netherlands, but I'd guess the same principle applies: growing the sweetener takes a lot of water, and theoretically there could be better uses for this water.

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Considering India is producing 20% of the world sugarcane I think sourcing a sweetener shouldn't be a problem.

True, but how is this relevant to how the amount of water used in producing the product affects water scarcity? Are you saying that because they "source" the sweetener it shouldn't be counted as an impact of the production?

coke gets delivered around the world in barrels concentrated. only water is added in factories.

This is a nice legend about the secret recipe. However production differs oflver the world. I.e. I'm the US the sweetener is high fructose corn syrup, while Europe uses Sycrose.

And in Mexico uses cane sugar.

Actually I think that’s only the version they export to US now

It's possible to find sugar-sweetened in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363053 I've never tried to get HFCS here, but doubt it'd be easy.

(anyone know specifically why the sweetener differs? I'm guessing either cost or legislation...)

Different theories, but there's a strong belief that Archer Daniels Midland lobbied intensively to create the current status quo in the US.

http://www.motherlindas.com/HFCS_murky.htm

https://grist.org/article/adm-high-fructose-corn-syrup-and-e...

https://youtu.be/gPbh6Ru7VVM (skip to 5:30)

Even in places where concentrate is delivered, they add the sweetener (HFCS, sugar, fruit juice, etc depending on location and product) at the bottling plant.

Coke is about 10% by volume sugar, and the pre-mixed syrup with sweetener (like used in soda fountains) is usually prepared for a 5:1 dilution ratio in a soda fountain. The concentrate that goes to the bottling plants is basically straight phosphoric acid and caffeine with some secret 'natural flavors' that is usually diluted at more than 1:100 ratio with the sweetener.

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