The amount of water that bottled drinks shift across watersheds would seem to be trivial. You have calculations that show otherwise?
I don’t have statistics, but every place I have lived there was a local bottling plant.
Depends on the watershed and the source of the water, no one thought we’d be depleting water aquifers when we started tapping them to water crops either, but we are.
There are lots of variables that come into play when you start doing this sort of thing, in some areas large water removal probably has little to no major impact.. in other places, removal of a lot less water from the system can have devastating impacts.
There is nothing “liberal” about asking the questions. It is also not “liberal” to realize that many actions done in the past were done without even asking the what impact will this have.
If I took 600,000 cubic feet of water out of the Mississippi at its mouth, that would equate to 1 second of its flow, the odds of that having any impact are negligible, go far enough upstream from there and that volume could represent a lot more of the flow and have a lot more impact.... sure at the mouth of the river no one would notice, but could affect a lot of folks.
The interesting thing with bottled products, plastic bottled products in particular, is that it takes more water to make that bottle than the bottle itself holds... When you add in the actual water used to make that 1 liter bottle, you end up having to use nearly a gallon of water for every bottle of water actually made... Same thing with soda, etc. I am not against these industries, but depending on their location and situation they can have imacts on water tables and things.
In the eastern US the impact of something like this would be negligible, assuming they are not taking water from deep aquifers and are using ground water in most places... in the Western US??? Well as someone pointed out, California is in a multi year severe drought, but still has bottling plants operating, which seems a bit insane just intuitively. However the real issues are no so much the US... but other nations where these sorts of plants can get built, in a developing nation someone upstream removes billions or trillions of gallons of water from your flow, and you can be talking life or death impacts for people downstream who probably were not taken into consideration in the planning or decision making.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with asking the questions, it doesn’t make one liberal to want to understand the impact. If the impact is real and tangible it needs to be taken into account when decisions are made... Lord knows how many chemicals we released into the world without any thought of the potential long term health impact they could cause... hopefully we’ve learned from that and will do better going forward.