This submission broke the HN guidelines by cherry-picking a detail from the article and using that for the title ("340 to 620 litres of water are used for every litre of soft drink produced"). That is editorializing, and it's not allowed here. The HN rule says to change the original title only when it is misleading or baity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We've changed this one back to the original, truncated to fit HN's 80 char limit.
You can see from this thread how powerfully a discussion is determined by the title when people do this. That's why we don't allow it. On HN, being the first (or luckiest) submitter of an article confers no special rights over the story. You don't get to frame it for others—they can and should make up their own minds. For that we need titles that reflect the content itself, not submitter spin.
If you'd like to point out what you think is important about a story, you're welcome to do so in the thread, where your opinion is on a level playing field with everyone else's. The title, though, should be that of the article or (when necessary to change it) an accurate and neutral description drawn from the article.
There's no more important single factor in making HN the substantive place we want it to be. The effect of an editorialized title is much stronger than you might think; in this case it was nearly total. I should remember this one to use as an example in the future.
Hi dang, comments like this are seen by .0000001% of your users, can we encode the rules in some moderation tools please? displaying the guidelines above the comment form would go a long way too.
I think he is for example counting the rain and irrigation water that falls on the sugar cane that it used to make the Coke.
Quote from the book:
In 2011, in- vestigators from the University of Twente Water Centre in the Netherlands conducted a careful assessment of the total direct and indirect water footprint of a specific soda: a half-liter bottle of a hypothetical carbonated beverage sweetened with beet sugar. They based their assessment on a systematic method developed specifically for this purpose.
The result: 170 to 310 liters per half-liter soft drink. But we don’t care about half liters. We care about full liters. For that, we need to double these figures, giving us astonishing water-use ratios of 340 to 620 liters per liter of soda. The range varied with the type of sweetener and the country growing the sugar. The 620 water-use ratio applied to a soda made with cane sugar grown in Cuba, whereas the 340 ratio applied to a soda sweetened with beet sugar produced in the water-efficient Netherlands. Sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup grown in the United States required 360 liters per liter. These amounts, enormous as they seem in comparison to the prize- winning 1.4, are on the low side of water use for food production; figures for meat and dairy production, for example, are higher.
The large majority of the water used (2/3) is for 'green water', AKA rainfall. If the rainfall wasn't used by the sugar cane, it would probably have been used by another plant occupying almost exactly the same ecological niche.
Blue water is groundwater (1/4) and you may be able to say the same thing about it. Some blue water comes from underground acquifiers, so pumping may be bad thing if you're pumping faster than it replenishes; others is pulled up by the root system so is completely natural.
8% is grey water, water required to flush fertilizer and other pollutants. That sounds bad, but it too is often part of the natural water cycle.
Most of the problematic water usage is caused by irrigation. Sugar cane & beet can and is produced without irrigation, but doing so requires more land usage and possibly extra fertilizer. In other words, it's a matter of trade-offs.
Adding some corn facts, as it's how most American soda is sweetened.
90% of the land area used for growing corn is not irrigated (100% green water) and in this case it's no trade off. It's not irrigated because there is adequate rainfall.
Right! Here in Iowa we water the corn the way God intended, by waiting for it to fall from the sky for free. I can always tell when flying to CA when I get into Nebraska, those huge 'crop circles' formed by irrigation start to show up.
Besides which, that water isn't lost; in the Netherlands, it either sinks into the soil to eventually become ground water again (after which it's reused), or it ends up in the sea via canals and rivers. It's not like we have a water shortage in NL, not yet anyway. Besides ground water, there are several rivers passing through NL coming from the Alps, sometimes to the point of overflowing.
Really, the only thing wasteful would be the energy needed to pump up and distribute the water. But we get some of the most efficient farmland in return, without harming anyone (unlike e.g. the US that caused the dustbowl thanks to overly aggressive farming)
edit: also that's only when irrigation is actually needed, we get our fair share of rain.
Scientifically-speaking, is any water "lost"? Thinking back to those pictures of plains and mountains with a big circular arrow in my seventh grade science textbook: couldn't you say that even the water used by crops, turned into coke, and consumed by humans is eventually returned the ecosystem in some form or another?
It's "lost" if it's taken from where it's needed (the water table near farm land, for instance) to where it isn't (the ocean).
In plenty of areas where water is needed, the time it would take for the big circular arrow "water cycle" to replenish it is so long, it should be considered a finite resource.
The reason U.S. farmers created the dustbowl was, in part, because they were immigrants from the European temperate forest biome and had no idea how to farm properly in the grasslands of the American west.
The Dutch are not master farmers, you are just in a fairly moist climate and the culture has been relatively uninterrupted due to political strength that you obtained through the plunder of the developing world. I don't think your water security is anything to be proud of. How is water security in the former Dutch colonies these days?
Water isn't lost, but water is polluted. And when you put water into the groundwater then it mixes with heavily polluted water from, among other things, agriculture. The Dutch farms may be efficient, but they are definitely polluting.
"In the Netherlands water pollution originating from agriculture is an important environmental concern. While recent trends indicate that the pressure from farming on water quality is diminishing, absolute levels of pollution remain amongst the highest across the OECD (Figures 2-5). Agriculture is the major source of nutrients, pesticides and the only known source of heavy metals in water. Pollution from endocrine disrupters and veterinary medicines in terms of potential impacts on human and wildlife reproductive systems is also a concern. The total external costs of agricultural water pollution are unknown, but in the late 1990s the annual external costs of eutrophication associated with nitrate emissions was estimated at €600 million (US$540 million), and for treating drinking water polluted with nitrates at an annual cost of €23 million (US$21 million)."
One way in which water can and does get 'lost' is river depletion. Colorado river doesn't reach the sea anymore, human demand is greater than its flow. Here's an interesting article about it: http://www.outsideonline.com/1928261/day-we-set-colorado-riv...
Not in the US. Its corn syrup or an artificial sweeter. Curious to know if corn's water footprint is more or less than sugar beet.
I guess there's a larger issue here on how water like this isn't truly lost or in competition for human drinking water. Its part of a natural cycle of rainwater, runoff, and back into the aquifers or evaporated. A better metric is the real cost of irrigation for those farms. There are a lot of practical areas to grow corn or sugar beet. Those areas are rich in water, so its not a big deal if you use that much water for argiculture. Water heavy farming in the midwest is different than water heavy farming in California.
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.
Very little water is lost in municipal water filtration. The largest loss is generally evaporation from dam reservoir which is on the order of 10%. Depening on location temperature, humidity, ect.
Don't forget you drink the same water you bathe with. At scale it's producing a lot of water.
PS: Now a lot of water is lost after filtration by leaks/breaks in water pipes. But, that's mostly an economic choice as water is really cheap replacing pipes is expensive.
The point he is making is not reduced to that, it is that you should judge things with the same metrics. I.e. how much water is used for bottled water? For running water? How much harmful chemicals can you find in soft drink, bottled water, tap water? (because running water may be very cost-efficient, but it comes with a price, the dizzying quantity of chlorine you can find inside being one).
Just giving one number out of your hat is a dishonest persuasive move (unless everybody already knows the numbers for all the previous questions), precisely because the author knows very well that most people cannot put that number into perspective. This is not a very scientific attitude for something published in a 'scientific' journal.
Despite what you might think water is not a particularly limited resource.
At the municipal level 1 cent ~= 1,000+ gallons of water but this can vary greatly by location. As a customer in many ways you are paying for pipes not water.
PS: California farmers often pay ~70$ on average per acre foot or 325,851 gallons. But, they also get a lot of water for far less than that it's the rare edge cases that are really expensive. http://westernfarmpress.com/water-70-24-million-acre-foot
I agree with you.
But what if you want to drink pure/purified water? You can do for little to no cost in certain conditions, but for city people there are either bottled water or some purifying systems that can be costly and of various levels of efficiency. Then, how much water does one liter of water costs?
But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough. But this is another question from the previous one, that should also be discussed taking the whole picture into account.
> But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough.
Distilled water will also osmotically drain you, although not at any level you should be worried about. But it's not at all clear that it's "better for you" than water with stuff in it.
To compare to this article you'd also have to calculate the amount of water used to make the pipes, dig the ditches, create the machinery to dig the ditches (and pro-rate the machinery's life time against the amount of time it's used to dig water pipe trenches), fuel used, etc, etc.
Your scale is off. The city of Philadelphia for example loses 60 million gallons per year to leaks out of 250 million gallons pumped from the river. (excluding leaks at the home and business level estimated at 1trillion gallons per year in the US.)
To get anywhere close to similar levels from the article you replacing there entire system every 20 years would need to take 20 * 60m * 340 = 408 Trillion gallons of water.
You'd have to distinguish between potable water and just any water too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water mentions that Christchurch, NZ has a sufficient supply of pure enough water that no treatment is required. So you could probably build a passive filtration system for a one time cost. It just may not be fast enough to treat enough water if your population is too big.
My guess is it varies greatly to due the source of the water. At the extreme, I would guess that desalination of saltwater to make it usable for drinking water would likely consume huge amount of water per drink unit of water.
Given that it's a pretty obvious question, find it interesting that it is not addressed; reason likely is most reporters do not do investigative journalism, but many will publish as is a story forwarded to them.
Lastly, it's very likely some water used was not drinkable to start, reused, etc. - which is to say, it's a complex topic and without a clear question and an understanding of why it is being ask, you'll always get an answer that appears to answer something.
How would desalination cost water? You vaporize water, catch and cool it back to water, and there you go. The cost here is energy, which varies greatly depending on the sun.
Unclear how much you know about the topic, but there are a number of ways to desalinate salt water, including just mixing non-toxic saltwater with drinkable freshwater; that said, it requires 31 liters of freshwater to make one liter of saltwater drinkable.
Normal saltwater has a salt concentration of 3.5% and to be drinkable that must be reduced to 1000 ppm (parts per million); which is to say, say for 100 liters of saltwater, you'll lose at least 3.5 liters just to reclaim the freshwater itself.
Beyond that it'll depend on the system how much additional volume is lost in the desalination process; quick Google finds some systems that lose 20% of the volume per unit processed.
Lastly, your reference to energy consumption brings up an example of additional sources of water lose. Water used to cool systems, water used to clean systems, leaks/waste, etc.
When you need 31 galles of freshwater to make 1 gallon salt water drinkable, you have 32 gallons of drinkable water. Those 32 gallons are not wasted. When you make one jeans or a t-shirt, you may need many more gallons. You cannot drink that water afterwards, so that totally different.
Reference to using freshwater for desalination has nothing to due with waste, but to make the point that boiling saltwater is only one of many ways to desalinate saltwater.
Not that I post for rep, or for that matter care about downvotes, but if you're expressing that the above comment was not of use, on-topic, opinionated, bad tone, etc. - it's not clear why. Please comment so that I might be able to address your concerns. Cheers!
There are a few more parts you can buy for the home install to make it more efficient. I can see the manufacturers leaving it out due to install space and cost.
My system is relatively new, but this thread has my thinking of ways I can better use that 4 gallons of waste.
That's handy to know. I was investigating whether I could make my hydroponics system recycle the water but the waste ratio made it unattractive - it was only for science.
Not just drinking water, but what of any liquid sold at the store? How much water does that milk take to produce by the gallon, orange juice, and such. I do know that in many plants most of the water is recycled as its cheaper than sending it out of plant. Even car washes recycle water for reuse.
At home I have a 1:1 ratio. I've got my own well and my own pump, so every liter of water I get out of the well flows out through my tap. I guess you could argue that the electricity needed to work the pump may be produced by means that waste water.
The mine that dug the iron that made your pipes contaminated a lot of water.
In the vegan world its standard to count every drop of rain that hit the livestock pasture as being used, therefore its fair to count the rain that ran off the factory roof where the pump was manufactured as used.
Wells don't dig themselves and although that doesn't happen often, it does take a lot of water to do it, and make the gear to do it, and get the diesel fuel out of the ground and onsite to run the drilling rig.
I drink every drop from a can/bottle, usually, but I am a bit wasteful in the kitchen sink and probably only half the tap water is swallowed. Not to mention my dishwasher uses 5 gallons or 10 gallons or whatever small number every time it cycles and washes my drinking cup (so my drinking cup's share is only maybe 1/2 cup of dishwasher cycle water, but, maybe I was only thirsty for 1/2 cup of water leading to 50% efficiency right there). And of course the dishwasher uses electricity (water) and detergent (water) and natgas to heat the water (contaminated fracking water).
I bet using the usual journalist sophistry techniques I could get your home sink up to 10:1 ratio pretty easy. Maybe not the hundreds to one ratio in the article, but close.
I get your bitter cynicism, but as someone who has worked with industrial processes, this is exactly how we quantify things.
The world is insanely inefficient, and those inefficiencies are REAL even if we have been that inefficient since prehistoric time. All of the points you mention are actual opportunities for improvement, and a 1% reduction in any of them would amount to an enormous savings in water use, fuel use, increase in long term profit, etc.
Modern dishwashers are in fact very frugal with water. The ones sold here typically take about 10 litres (2.5 gal) for a main program.
For some of us, it's irritating of course: the program takes a long time due to the attempts to save water, and we have no shortage of clean water here whatsoever, so time is wasted to save water which could be wasted.
The dishwasher etc is not part of producing the drinking water. It's just a way of consuming it.
But I get your point about the entire construction of the well. And the drilling rig, say it drills 500 wells in its life span. Then you have to consider the water that went in to building the rig, divided by 500. And the water that goes in to disassembly and recycling. And the water that went in to building the drill rig factory. And that went into building the tools that were used to build the factory. Etc.
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 case most of the water 'used' in the production of a litre of sugar-enhanced carbonated water was never lost.
A quick search for 'global aquifer depletion' yields
"Scientists had long suspected that humans were taxing the world’s underground water supply, but... major aquifers [are] indeed struggling to keep pace with demands from agriculture, growing populations, and industries such as mining." ... "The situation is quite critical" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/16/new-n...)
This talks about a water source, and more specifically a slow-filling source that has been tapped too much. This is where you should apply your concern and effort, to the protection and wise management of easily accessible fresh water sources that are being depleted too rapidly.
If someone talks about water usage (usually in a generic 'it takes X gallons to make a Y, so you should feel bad about doing/using Y' format) without regard to the specific sources then they are trying to bullshit you. If they talk about a specific source and use then keep reading to see if the rest of their argument holds up to scrutiny.
It is still relevant though; because for things like soft drinks that have an extremely low price-to-weight ratio, the only production model that makes sense is a local one. Coca-Cola doesn't just have 3 or 4 factories in the US that make soda; they have one (if not more) in every major city. Some of those cities make use of vulnerable water supplies, and some don't.
But ultimately it's the same conversation - any manufacturing of perishable / low-cost-to-weight ratio (e.g. cement is almost always produced at a factory within 50 miles of where it is used) at industrial scale is being done in a consistent, distributed way at many different locations around the country/world. If those processes damage vulnerable environments, they need to be looked at and modified.
Concrete (as well as mortar, stucco, and other such products) is made locally, both dry and wet mix. Cement is made in remote areas, typically near the limestone quarries, because the process involves large, dirty, smelly kilns.
But the vast majority of the water used is in the sugar-growing stage and and creation of the packaging. Neither of these things are done even remotely locally.
We "use" water so poorly for agriculture and cities. I lived in Imperial Valley California. They have an open canal through a very dry desert for 100 miles. The canal is made of porous concrete that leaks along the way. It is then used in the farms to produce what I was told is the majority of America's lettuces and vegetables.
They LOVE farming out here since there is virtually no rain or weather events to complicate things. They have everything down to a science and a tight schedule that rarely if ever changes. We use up 90%+ of the Colorado River for this one purpose. We then ship these all across the nation using more resources. Seems a bit wasteful.
You're both right ... the water is still in the system but no longer in the aquifers (instead it's in the oceans, air, lakes, streams, etc). Apparently, a small amount of water is lost to space (but that will increase as the sun grows hotter). When another extinction-level comet smashes into the earth, it will replenish the water we've lost.
But this is an issue which varies a lot by geographic region. So it depends entirely where the soft drinks are being produced. Most places don't pull water from aquifers.
Also I have no idea where they are even getting this number. I think they are counting everything from rainwater that falls on the sugar beets, to the, water used by steam engines to produce electricity. But it's hard to tell because they don't explain the figure at all.
You can't destroy water, but you can most definitely destroy fresh water. Or else you could have the same argument for just about anything ("I didn't really break your cup, all the pieces are still lying on the floor.")
The problem is absolute quantities mean nothing: water is a resource which depends on production capacity. So long as it is in sustainable excess there are no problems.
This is an interesting issue for young people today. I'm too old, but young people will have "fun" dealing with land west of the Mississippi being in a massive overpopulation bubble, and folks east of the Mississippi having more water than we know what to do with now, and with climate change we're supposed to have even more water leading to some interesting infrastructure problems.
For a bit less than 50 years I've heard continuous and constant boosterism that the burbs will migrate back into the city center. No really, this time we're serious about it, etc. Its a cliche now. However a much more interesting migration, is over the next generation or two, most of the west half of the USA will have to migrate back to the east half, assuming they want to drink water or grow plants. Its going to be interesting to watch, at least for today's younger kids to watch.
Note that the land will support some people. In 2030 the west is not going to be empty, any more than it was empty in 1830. It just won't have as many people as now.
I doubt it. Several factors spring to mind that will prevent that specific mass migration:
1) The use of a (small) part of the west's capital to pipe water in from further away
2) Opportunities for multiple orders of magnitude better conservation.
3) Desalination
None of those are as easy as "just wait for rain" but as long as it's cheaper than the entire state of California ($10 trillion?) then it's not a financial hardship compared to "everyone just leave."
I'm not so sure about this. Water -> vapor -> water loop only works if there's a temperature gradient - you need heat to vaporize water and coldness to condense vapor into water again. If the whole planet is getting hotter, the atmosphere could simply get more humid, with no more rain/fresh water.
We have such temperature gradient every night. We have lack of rains in some areas because they are too hot at evening, because of deforestation, but this is an another story.
We also can create temperature gradient by adding shade at some areas, e.g. using SO2 at altitude of about 20km.
It takes energy, not time. It takes a long time if you passively wait for random environmental processes to slowly replace the water, and a very short amount of time if you actively apply energy to the problem.
That actually highlights the problem perfectly. Energy is the metric that matters.
With current knowledge and level of technology humanity has, we can make almost anything by applying energy to shuffling dirt. Need gasoline? We can synthesize it. Need gold? We can recycle it out of stuff. Need drinking water? We can make it out of almost anything.
All that's needed is energy, which is something we don't have much of. Last time I checked we didn't have the world full of nuclear reactors. Until we hit a sustainable and ridiculous energy abundance, we can't assume we can fix any global problem with energy - there's not enough of it to go around.
Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power.
One key questions for rulers and governments from antiquity is how to allow the population to gather energy to survive. It could be farming, or building oil wells and then hand out the profits or build a service economy around the oil.
> Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power.
But we can with nuclear plants, and I'm thinking garden variety fission plants, not the always-30-years-from-now fusion ones. There are various areas where we use fossil fuels only because its more convenient - e.g. ground transportation. We can go electric with most of it. Fertilizers - I'm not sure if petroleum is a necessary chemical component or just energy delivery vector for the production process. Plastics are I think the only area where we can't easily sidestep fossil fuels. But with enough electricity we can still synthesize the compounds we need for those processes.
I have thought about this problem and came to the same conclusion - we need to move to nuclear. But then if most of our energy needs are from nuclear, now we're going to be back in the same situation in 50 years running out of uranium.
Or we could sit in top of our coal power plants slurping oil, wait for the magical thorium reactor and/or solar power to become another 10 times more economical.
Maybe not in 50 years, because it seems that we have a lot of fissile material available[0] that should last us for a long time - long enough to expand past this planet if we continue the growth curve, or at least to advance and deploy renewable solutions without a hurry. But yeah, with continued growth we would hit an energy ceiling in the future too. That ain't bad if reasonably managed - we could fix all the damage done to this planet and expand to the Solar System. But then again, humanity isn't exactly known for reasonable management.
>> "The IEA estimates that, in 2013, total world energy consumption was 13,541 Mtoe , or 5.67 × 1020 joules, equal to an average power consumption of 18.0 terawatts.[3]"
One gigawatt nuclear plant uses 162 tons per year.
The world uses 18000 gigawatts per year. (40% oil, 10% coal, 15% natural gas, 35% other).
If all the fossil fuel-based energy were replaced with nuclear power, the nuclear power plants need to provide 18000 gigawatts times 65% = 11700 gigawatts.
11700 gigawatts times 162 tons of uranium is 1.9 million tons of uranium, per year.
The world's conventional reserves of 4.7 million tons will last for three years.
The 22 million tons in Phosphate deposits will last for another 10 years. (if and when methods to mine them economically are discovered)
Perhaps the seawater uranium will come in time, but as yet it is not an economical method of uranium extraction. The cost needs to be reduced by 5 to 10 times.
> Most our energy comes from fossil fuels. Even fertiliser for our food. So we can't just replace it all with solar power.
That doesn't follow at all. Why not?
There's plenty of sunlight in the areas with most of the people, and the areas with most of the farmland. We have storage solutions--they're still a little expensive, but they're certainly getting close.
If our current energy came from hydroelectric or geothermal could we replace it with solar? Your statement seems like a complete non sequitur.
This statement may be wrong but for different reasons - it boils down to just how much electricity vs. petroleum we need to use to make fertilizer. I don't know much about fertilizer manufacturing, but from a quick look at Wikipedia I think that for nitrogen ones we could conceivably replace natural gas with some other hydrogen source and run the whole Haber-Bosch stack off electricity.
Why not run the world on nuclear power? With breeder reactors, there is enough uranium for more than million years of current world electricity consumption. Nuclear energy is cheap, and modern reactor designs are safe.
Even given the cost overruns, insurance, nuclear pools, etc it is quite cheap. The only problem with nuclear power is that it is highly centralized and requires significant upfront capital expenditures. And political consequences of radiophobia are so high that investing in nuclear power is limited.
I think that solar and nuclear are the only sustainable power generation methods these days. The rest are either bad for the environment, or ineffective.
I can't accept the morality of handing stewardship of spent nuclear fuel to my children and their children for a thousand generations. Would you still want to be caring for a monster left to us by the people who wrote on cave walls?
As far as a DGR, I'll believe it when a nation other than Finland has shovels in the ground to actually build one.
Nuclear fuel waste is much less dangerouns than many other substances created in industrial chemical processes, and occur in much smaller amounts. Managing that is a non-problem compared to other hazardous waste. That people are afraid of radioactive waste and aren't of what their friendly neighbourhood chemical plant produces is pure FUD.
Not exactly, unfortunately. (I am as pro-nuclear as one could be). However, all chemical waste can be neutralized and reprocessed (though this might be expensive to do so). Some nuclear waste can't be reprocessed and has to be stored safely for hundreds of years. This scares some people.
However, it's not _that_ dangerous. Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).
> Even if containment is breached, it generally stays in the same place and can be collected and put back (happened a lot of times).
Asse II springs to my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine An old salt mine used to store low/medium radioactive waste that's under threat of collapse due to ground water. There are plans for the retrieval, but success is far from guaranteed.
This might be a dumb question, but is there any reason other than costs that we couldn't eventually just blast unrecycleable nuclear waste off into the sun/space? There must be an inflection point where the cost of storing the hazardous material safely on earth is more expensive after a period of time than just sending it out of orbit on a space elevator/ICBM.
Sending things to outer space is crazily expensive in terms of fuel; the same holds if you aim for the Sun - the common idea that it's easy is very wrong. The Earth is moving around the Sun at 30km/sec, you need to burn off most of that velocity to actually hit it. For leaving the Solar System, the Internet provides the value of around 40km/sec. You can get most of those speeds by clever use of slingshot maneuvers though, and this is the way we usually do missions to outer planets.
Also, honestly, I don't see the point. The amount of nuclear waste we produce is minuscule compared to other equally or more dangerous chemical substances. Besides wasting perfectly good rocket fuel, destroying it this way would rob us of opportunity to reuse it in the future - hell, we already know how to reprocess some of the spent nuclear fuel for next-gen fission reactors!
2) What monster could be left by stone-age people to us that modern technology couldn't handle?
Modern spent fuel processing methods are great and quite safe (vitrification / underground disposal). I can't imagine a newsworthy worst case scenario with vitrified containers.
2) As long as we assume that society continues on its current trajectory forever, then yes, there's nothing to worry about. But if it's true that we're in the twilight years of US dominance or relevance as a world power, then we could be in for a significant period of upcoming political/economic turmoil.
So here's another way to look at it: How would the monks and agrarian fiefdoms of the middle ages been at handling a monster leftover by the Romans?
Yes, I agree. I might have not worded my comment clearly enough. What I meant is: I don't see the world being full of nuclear powerplants right now, so we don't have a sustainable energy surplus to stupidly waste.
EDIT: Fixed wording in the original comment; I hope it's clearer now.
In reality, time is the metric the matters, human time. All that stuff you talk about costs human time to build. That's why it's not being built - it's cheaper to do something else.
Once you have a robotic army capable of mining resources and building everything you want, including rebuilding itself, you can just have them throw up a bunch of solar panels and have enough energy for desalination.
I disagree. Human time is not a problem. Yes, in a moral world it would be the most important metric. But nowadays, labour is cheap and abunant. That's why we don't have robotic armies doing stuff all around us - it's cheaper to make people work. We're energy-bound as a civilization now (or, one could say, still).
You keep using this word "used", I do not think it means what you think it means...
Energy is one of those strange things, where consumption is not necessarily destruction. You 'used' a joule of energy when you heated up your coffee this morning, then dumped the waste heat to the rest of your kitchen, where it became an input for another part of the cycle. The energy did not go away when you consumed it, and in this case most of the energy 'used' in the production of a cup of coffee was never lost.
[I kid, I kid, I know you meant negentropy, but I just couldn't help myself.]
Energy is the only resource I know about where there is a physical law stating that this must be true. (To be fair, you could have less energy offset by more mass. But the point stands.)
... That's exactly what I was referring to? You seem to be confused. Your responded to a post stating that energy is never destroyed, with the sentence:
"Energy is about the only resource where this doesn't hold true."
First, heat is energy. Second, you can use heat as heat. Third, you can use heat to boil water to turn a turbine to create electricity, which you can use to do very many things, including create heat.
Now, whether we can effectively use the energy is an entirely other question. There's plenty of technical limitations. But in a closed system there's no reason an object cannot have perpetual motion with perfect energy recovery. Of course, closed systems don't help us, because they cannot exert useful work outside of the system.
You can't. You can increase the efficiency that way, but you can't use it to produce limitless energy. We wouldn't be burning fossil fuels if that was an option.
You're not "producing" limitless energy. You're reusing the existing energy, because the energy cannot be destroyed. Again, there's no reason why this can't be done within a closed system, except for our technical limitations. Indeed, tracking and recovering energy is the entire idea behind reversible computing.
In theory at least, all non-radioactive elemental resources are recoverable from whatever combinations in which they are found, given sufficient energy and information.
The marginal energy is probably not very much. The average energy might be significant, but it's probably dwarfed by a single can of soda if you include the can.
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.
Add to all the current comments in this subthread the fact that every drop of water you keep in a bottle is a drop of water you are keeping out of the system.
It's not just what you drink, it's what you remove from the cycle. And you'd like to keep the balance, right?
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.
I thought the same thing about yogurt. The flavored ones have a lot of sugar and people I know say they want a less sweet version.
Then last week I met a man in the supermarket. We were both staring at various yogurts. I was comparison shopping; he was "spying" on the competition and the store. You see, he worked for a yogurt maker.
He asked me what I considered important and I asked him about reduced sugar variants. He said this topic came up over and over in market research. Customers demand reduced sugar. But when they do taste testing, most of those customers choose a product with mainstream sweetness. They want the idea of less sugar. But their tastebuds are not prepared for it.
"People" isn't one person. Maybe most people choose sweeter yogurt, but that doesn't mean there isn't a substantial minority of people who would prefer less sweet yogurt.
Who knows if these tests even accurately measure what people would actually buy? I remember that Coca-Cola did such tests too once...
The guy I spoke with was unequivocal: they don't think they can sell enough to make it worth any shelf space at all. Their brand in my market gets allocated enough space for about five flavors. They know exactly what sells how much and where, and they know it to some extent for their competitors too (none of whom produce reduced-sugar, but most of whom do produce reduced-fat).
Now, if your argument is that these full time professional market researchers can't figure out what people would actually buy...well, I thought the guy sounded extremely intelligent and well trained, and he had no reason to deceive me.
Yeah. It's because we've been given sugary shit en masse for decades. It's like asking someone addicted to heroin if they would like to stop doing heroin.
Anyway, the rise of Greek yogurt at least shows that this isn't 100% true. It does need a little sugar for me to find it palatable as breakfast, but like, we're talking 2 or 3 sliced strawberries or a handful of blueberries.
Speaking about markets for alternative solutions, I would very much appreciate more reusability in containers. Like the Germans do with (some sizes of) plastic Cola bottles - they get refilled, not recycled. We waste ridiculous amounts of energy on making throwaway packaging. Recycling helps limit the waste, yes, but more often than not it seems like an attempt to optimize an utterly broken solution that shouldn't have been implemented in the first place.
As a kid, I collected bottles from wherever I could find them, and returned them to get more juice, or stickers, or trading cards, or sweets. Some shopkeepers even gave you the money back in cash, rather than making you use it to buy something from them, and those were the preferred shops at which to return the bottles. When I visited Canada with family as a teenager, I diligently returned all the plastic bottles and cans I came across for the 5c refund.
Nowadays, I live in a poor part of town, and right up until Barr stopped the refund, I would see kids going around picking up Barr bottles and returning them. Whilst they were doing that, they'd usually (unprompted) pick up other bits of rubbish and drop them in the bin too, effectively cleaning as they went.
That 30p refund might not mean much to most people, but to some people, it means a lot --- and as an unintended benefit, it encouraged a certain conscientiousness and pride in the place they lived. I'm sad that they stopped it, and that's without even considering the environmental impact.
I agree. I find that the more you go without, the sweeter things taste when you go back. I used to drink diet fizzy drinks and then found the regular ones way too sweet.
If you are an out-lier then I'm positively martian. I don't drink fruit juices or fizzy drinks. I eat the fruit and drink water, coffee and alcohol (the latter a few times a week).
Yoghurt drinks: UK local asian restaurants will bring you a glass of lassi, either sweet or with salt.
I think a large part of the "taste" of "fizzy" drinks is governed by the amount of sugar and salt they put in it. I also dilute plain fruit juice with water as it feels more palatable, but I don't mind fizzy drinks as they're very refreshing.
I will mention the Coca Cola plant in Cayey, Puerto Rico.
I consulted with them some years ago, and they were #1 in Coca Cola's water consumption world wide.
If I am not mistaken, they would "use" 1-1/2 gallons of water for every 1 gallon of soft drink they produced.
I do remember the water treatment plant operator working with co-workers from other countries... especially Haiti.
What they told me is that in Haiti, Coca Cola's operation were really bad in wastefulness, and under the company's initiative they were trying to bring their Haiti water treatment plant in-line with Puerto Rico's.
This relates more to the information found online. But I think the original article is talking about how much water it takes to produce all of the ingredients as well.
It is not a very fair way of comparing one resource to another.
My browser shows me a 2 page article with numbers pulled out of thin air.
Btw 620 and 340 is very far apart. One drink uses 68 l of water for packaging and the other 124 l? I am skeptical.
Almonds? Almonds are probably the most drought resistant plant grown for human consumption, it can grow almost anywhere without irrigation. In fact, too much moisture kills its roots.
It's much less than other crops and the description says it's assuming irrigation is the only source of water, that's not usually the case. It's probably not the case with almonds at all, unless you aim for rotten roots. It's a desert tree.
That's nonsense. It's native to the Middle East, from the Levant to Pakistan. I see no good reason why growing it should be problematic in California. They either use it as an excuse to get more water for other crops, or they're doing something very wrong, though I have no idea what it could be.
They planted large orchards in a desert. The linked article doesn't make any statements about how much water each tree is getting, so I'm not sure what you would be calling nonsense.
It does state that California grows most of the world supply of almonds, perhaps the number of trees being supported by the imported water is much higher than you think?
Large orchards of desert trees. I get that the valley may be too dry even for almonds, but that won't turn them into a "relatively thirsty crop" as the article insists.
Sorry, I was not clear. I'm skeptical about any of the numbers being accurate. After all it is anecdotal and I think it is too general and not grasps the problem well when your precision is 340-620. No more information than some soft drink production uses twice as much water.
Not really. The "used" here is quite different. The water doesn't disappear (but oil, when burned or used for other materials as plastic, really ceases to be oil).
But is it over of those things like solar and shale oil that is too expensive at current rates, but just sits in the background and enforces a price ceiling on the cheaper methods?
Just like the statistic of sweet beverages. Of course that beers that include fish stuff require more or less water.
Of course that wine produced in dry climate requires a lot of water.
Producing a cow, chicken or pig will take a lot of water, probably not much of a difference if animal is located at northern/southern parts or in some shed at equatorial region.
I don't understand what is misleading. Data of water pollution should be of more concern than how much water something needs to thrive.
This data shouldn't influence your decision of what to consume. Data of pollution should.
If you're worried some categories are incorrect then at least you have a lower bound there. Add the water footprint of food that cow or pig eats and then you'll get more accurate. It's no-brainer that raising 60 billion land animals yearly takes a lot of water but it's a silly statistic. The pollution of water that the process creates is more important and a much more relevant statistic.
Well, it's a lot compared to a litre of water ;)
But indeed, a comparison to other beverages would be useful, or even a breakdown ("20% of that is from packaging"). Perhaps it's given by the high sugar content?
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?
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.
It depends on who you mean by "the meat industry" and who's doing the measuring. It's possible to have deplorable levels of inefficiency at one end and something approximating buffalo grazing on the other.
That's a bunch of nonsense. If you calculated the water used in the production of every liter of drinking water, you would also find there are inefficiencies. It is the nature of adding value, you use more lower grade resources to produce higher grade resources. I know some of you will get an aneurysm just by reading that because you have an instinct level reaction to soft drink being described as value added, but reality simply is that a higher caloric drink that sells for higher monetary value is a higher value product than simple water.
You could just as well publish a finding that you should filter your own pond scum and boil it yourself because the potable water infrastructure costs water to produce potable water you just squander by showering yourself.
For reference, 1 lb (454 g) of beef requires between 3800 L and 9500 L of water. This implies a typical beef restaurant "value meal" demands on the order of 10000 L of water.
Another important point is that fresh water is neither created nor destroyed, although entropy leads to more energy being required in the entire supply chain for its consumption and in external systems to treat/move/reclaim water for other purposes (increased competition / water prices).
There's also pesticide and fertilizer runoff, deforestation and reduced rainfall (Brazil) and antibiotic resistant, pandemic disease emergence (swine flu).
Perhaps a bit tangential - but when things like this say 'diet soda has not been shown as an effective means of weight control' it annoys me. Not because I don't think there are serious questions are diet soda, but because the mischaracterized what diet soda is - not a weight control product but rather a zero calorie drink.
Especially when they go on to talk about shell lobbying companies with dubious names, you would think they would avoid imitating...
I just saw a CNBC documentary about the issue of water shortages in India and how Pepsi is at the heart of the controversy. The interesting thing was how many people Pepsi employs, but is accused of contributing to the ongoing water shortages because is their plants in the area.
It's not like the water is converted into pure energy and radiated into space. It is still there - some of it is locked away in the polymers in the packaging, which can be recycled, some of it is used for washing operations and is available for reuse after treatment, some of it is used to water the corn and joins the larger water cycle...
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However, the water you speak of there is, to a first approximation, one liter of water for one liter of Coke. That particular water contributes less than 1% of the water the article is talking about.
You can see from this thread how powerfully a discussion is determined by the title when people do this. That's why we don't allow it. On HN, being the first (or luckiest) submitter of an article confers no special rights over the story. You don't get to frame it for others—they can and should make up their own minds. For that we need titles that reflect the content itself, not submitter spin.
If you'd like to point out what you think is important about a story, you're welcome to do so in the thread, where your opinion is on a level playing field with everyone else's. The title, though, should be that of the article or (when necessary to change it) an accurate and neutral description drawn from the article.
There's no more important single factor in making HN the substantive place we want it to be. The effect of an editorialized title is much stronger than you might think; in this case it was nearly total. I should remember this one to use as an example in the future.