A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
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Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#2This exact situation in Venezuela made me think Hugo Chávez was not always completely nuts with some of his ideas.
He was sick of multinationals like Coke buying water for a couple of cents a mega-liter. Coke would then add some sugar and color to it before selling it back to the people for dollars per liter. The expensive purification of that water was paid for by tax revenue.
Chávez decided this was not right, and put an extremely heavy tax on multi-nationals buying "resources" from Venezuela and doing that.
Personally, I think the world would be a better place if that was the law everywhere.
On a related note, Juneau, the capital of Alkasa needs a new water purification plant, theirs is running beyond capacity. The proposal was to increase tax so everyone pays for it. It came to light Holland-America (cruise line) buys millions of gallons for a tiny, tiny fraction of the price that locals pay. When it was suggested to Holland-America they should pay a little more to help fund the new purification plant, Holland-America simply threatened to stop bringing cruise ships to Juneau. So now the residents pay more tax so that Holland-America can continue to buy millions of gallons for much cheaper than the locals pay!
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#3So where I'm from we have a similar problem yet no end in site. After last years summer we had one of the worst droughts this region has ever had, but then it went into winter. It didn't rain much this winter and now we're back in summer... With water restrictions starting the summer as bad as they were when we ended it.
To the point of this though. One of the worlds largest breweries is situated in my city. My country has a horrendous alcohol problem, to the extent where paying farm labourers in booze only got outlawed just over 20 years ago.
Anyway this brewery makes most of the beer in the Southern Hemisphere, yet it was able to get so large because it is right on top of one of the biggest springs, and they claimed riparian rights many years ago.
My problem being is that up until this year, for the past 3 years, the public was allowed access to the spring on their land. Now they are denying the public access while we go through a drought and they continue to produce beer for next to nothing as they don't pay a cent for their biggest ingredient. Now I want to stop them making beer while we are in a drought, but in a country run by alcohol makers that will surely either be an impossible task or end up getting me killed.
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#4Same in India:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/18/indian-o...
everywhere!
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#5The article is not very clear. It looks like most of the problem is caused by population grow, without good infrastructure. Not by Coca-Cola.
Also, this is misleading:
> FEMSA reports that it uses 56.9 billion liters of water a year in its operations across Latin America. In Mexico, the company holds 40 water permits.
The 56.9 billon liters seams to be a lot and it is a lot, but it's the total in Latin America. But this number is not related to the problem in Chiapas. How much water does the plant in Chiapas use?
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#6This exact situation in Venezuela made me think Hugo Chávez was not always completely nuts with some of his ideas. He was sick of multinationals like Coke buying water for a couple of cents a mega-liter. Coke would then add some sugar and color to it before selling it back to the people for dollars per liter. The expensive purification of that water was paid for by tax revenue. Chávez decided this was not right, and…
In fairness, the cruise visitors to Juneau do spend a fair bit of money there.
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#7While Coca-Cola deserves a great deal of blame for this (obviously), surely the bigger part of the blame should go to the local government for allowing them to do this? Isn't the people, and therefore the government, sovereign? Or are there some laws/constitutional issues that would prevent the government from restricting Coca-Cola in taking all the water?
By the way, this is why corporate-written and corrupt treaties such as TPP and TTIP can be so dangerous if they end-up preventing national governments from putting such restrictions against multi-national companies.
Another thought: expect more of this to happen when corporations start being run by AI - a lot more. A corporation is already an inhuman entity that's highly biased towards "increasing profits at all costs" without regard for much else. An AI-run corporation would be a supercharged version of that.
People who also "can't wait to be governed by their AI overlords" should take the same thing into consideration.
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#8This exact situation in Venezuela made me think Hugo Chávez was not always completely nuts with some of his ideas. He was sick of multinationals like Coke buying water for a couple of cents a mega-liter. Coke would then add some sugar and color to it before selling it back to the people for dollars per liter. The expensive purification of that water was paid for by tax revenue. Chávez decided this was not right, and…
> This exact situation in Venezuela made me think Hugo Chávez was not always completely nuts with some of his ideas.
Well, they were protecting environmental travesties before and after; the only difference was that he got a greater cut.
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#9The article is not very clear. It looks like most of the problem is caused by population grow, without good infrastructure. Not by Coca-Cola. Also, this is misleading: > FEMSA reports that it uses 56.9 billion liters of water a year in its operations across Latin America. In Mexico, the company holds 40 water permits. The 56.9 billon liters seams to be a lot and it is a lot, but it's the total in Latin America. But t…
from the article :
> The plant consumed over 1.08 million liters of water per day in 2016.
Re: A Coca-Cola plant in Mexico uses 1.08M liters of water per day as wells dry up
#10This exact situation in Venezuela made me think Hugo Chávez was not always completely nuts with some of his ideas. He was sick of multinationals like Coke buying water for a couple of cents a mega-liter. Coke would then add some sugar and color to it before selling it back to the people for dollars per liter. The expensive purification of that water was paid for by tax revenue. Chávez decided this was not right, and…
In fairness, the cruise visitors to Juneau do spend a fair bit of money there.
If you have ever been, you would see 99.9% of cruise passengers stay down the end of town designed for them, where the ships dock.
Guess who owns the vast majority of shops there!......
Yup! Holland-America!
(Friends tried to open a jewellery shop in Skagway, AK and didn't want to pay the kick-backs Holland-America demanded.... so Holland-America just warns people on the ships not to shop there .. "We heard someone got ripped off.. " etc. Out of business in less than one season!)