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Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

nature.com

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Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#11

Post by evgen »

evgen wrote: post #5

You keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means... Fresh water is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a glass of water that you drank this morning, then excreted it over the rest of the day as urine and water vapor where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The water did not go away when you consumed it, and in this ca…

Another way to look at this is that water is a proxy for energy. We can replace any fresh water that is 'used' via some application of energy to the abundant salt water on this planet. Soda may be a poor application of energy, but talking about it in terms of water 'used' is mostly FUD.

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#12

Post by Smaug123 »

I'm fairly anecdotally sure there would be a market for much less sweet fizzy drinks. I know I'm a weird outlier, because I dilute fruit juice with water to make it more palatable, but I think I'd really like sugary soft drinks if they had the same flavour but heroically less sweetness. My favourite soft drink is two parts orange juice from concentrate, to one part carbonated water; perhaps that's not sweet enough for mass-market, but I'm not the only one who stays away from fizzy drinks because they find them too sweet.

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#14

Post by johnloeber »

Here's what I'm curious about: how much water is used for every liter of drinking water? It seems clear that a "liter of water", which could be all kinds of polluted, is NOT the same as a liter of bottled or tap water. A liter of drinkable water has to undergo some filtration process, etc. and I'd be extremely interested in seeing how much water is used in that process. That would help put the headline's figure in context.

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#15

Post by rwjwjuwjudf »

evgen wrote: post #5

You keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means... Fresh water is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a glass of water that you drank this morning, then excreted it over the rest of the day as urine and water vapor where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The water did not go away when you consumed it, and in this ca…

Did you use a computer to post your comment?

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#16

Post by eddd »

cpach wrote: post #10
evgen wrote: post #5

You keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means... Fresh water is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a glass of water that you drank this morning, then excreted it over the rest of the day as urine and water vapor where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The water did not go away when you consumed it, and in this ca…

Perhaps it would be more illuminating to see how much energy was used to create the soft drink.

Or how much energy is used to perform single google query.

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#17

Post by evgen »

jtwaleson wrote: post #7

How much is used to produce one litre of bottled water?

From that same article it mentions that 20% of the water 'used' was involved in packaging. Bottled water has the same packaging and will involve the same transportation issues, etc. The only difference is going to be in the water used to create the sweetener (sugar, corn, etc) and in those cases the water is 1) not lost, and 2) often coming from sources like rainfall over a vast area that would otherwise be unavailable to us.

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#18

Post by onion2k »

Assuming this is, at least in part, water that's used for things like cooling plastics when bottles are made or rinsing machines to clean them, that number would be a simple calculation of the amount of water used per litre without taking in to account the fact that a lot of the the water in the system is recycled. A manufacturer could use the same 340 litres to make 1,000,000 litres of soft drinks, right?

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#19

Post by morsch »

Yver wrote: post #3

Is that a lot or...? Without a frame of reference I don't know if it's more than a litre of coffee or a litre of asparagus water from Whole Foods.

Per volume of the end product, coffee is worse, black tea is better.

Coffee: ~1100 liters of water per liter of coffee.

Black tea: ~270 liters of water per liter of tea.

Source: The water footprint of coffee and tea consumption in the Netherlands, http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/ChapagainHoekstra2...

Re: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

#20

Post by noja »

evgen wrote: post #5

You keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means... Fresh water is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a glass of water that you drank this morning, then excreted it over the rest of the day as urine and water vapor where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The water did not go away when you consumed it, and in this ca…

It takes time to get the water back where you can drink it. We had this discussion before when we talked about the drought in California.
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