You’ll read a lot of comments on this, both good and bad. A lot of passionate arguments have been made on both sides. I have two things to add to it—and feel free to take them as you will. People I know in the area with wells had them go dry after the nestle plant opened. These were wells that had previously been high (for wells) throughout, just drying up. The plant also got special tax rebates and other incentives to open with the idea they’d make it back with taxes and jobs but it’s never materialized.
I don't know specifically about this Nestle plant -- although they are shits for going after limited water resources in the Shasta watershed in California.
But as to various forms of high-capacity wells in general, in neighboring Wisconsin, not only are other pre-existing wells at risk from this -- which the Republican state government continues to seek to reduce regulation of and control over, meaning planning and effective and fair management of a limited resource. New high-capacity wells are also threatening and impacting lakes. A lot of those wells are for agri-business, such as very large capacity commercial animal husbandry/farming.
In those cases, the other risk is resulting animal waste; disposal often leaves it contaminating the aquifer.
Quite arguably, this isn't "conservative" at all. They aren't conserving resources -- nor existing property rights and businesses. It is "Conservative", an ideology that places money and individual short-term gain before all else.
I'm from Wisconsin as well and agree completely. The conservatives haven't been conservative in this state for many years. They're just Super PAC and special interest representatives running under the flag of the Republican party.
> People I know in the area with wells had them go dry after the nestle plant opened. These were wells that had previously been high (for wells) throughout, just drying up.
That (if true) is a legitimate complaint and Nestle should make them whole.
Edit: as someone else noted, this is less than one swimming pool's worth of water per day. If wells are going dry because of that, they were marginal at best.
> Edit: as someone else noted, this is less than one swimming pool's worth of water per day.
We're talking an olympic size swimming pool @660k gals each day, not the backyard type which is probably 1/6 the size [1].
Also rates matter. It's not how much is there, it's the depletion rate - recharge rate (families probably don't use nearly that much per day, so over time it would be many many olympic sized swimming pools).
Swimming pools are huge and not often emptied. Homes usually pay ~$6,000 to fill a pool. 576,000 gallons / day is ~6000 people's daily usage.
Wells have specific recovery rates. I don't know whether the amount they're pumping will exceed that rate-- environmental studies should include that information.
I think you need to double check those numbers. Last time I refilled a pool it was a maybe $250-$500, and that was with summer water rates in the middle of a desert. The average person's pool is definitely not 576,000 gallons (that's about 160 ft by 100 feet if your pool's mean depth is 5 feet). Even if it were, $8 per hcf seems high.
I don’t know anything about the price of water in any of those places, can you cite some numbers?
By the way, why are you so passionate about this topic? You’ve made 17 comments on this thread, or 17% of all of the comments here as of this writing. Thst seems extreme to me. The one I’m responding to isn’t substantive, another is just a single word. Dominating a conversation with sheer volume seems extreme, and impolite.
Wells in aquifers don't work quite that way - they aren't open bodies of water that can flow freely.
When a well draws water, it creates a cone-like depression of the water level around the well (think of all those nifty gravity diagrams of planets). A well which was drilled sufficiently deep to work with existing draws can be made "dry" by getting a new neighbor who draws enough to lower the aquifer below their well head.
Those wells can be made to work again, but only by having a company come in and make the well (perhaps significantly) deeper.
An search on "aquifer drawdown" will provide a lot of reference material.
So long as nothing is shipped outside the Great Lakes watershed, I am not opposed to this. The problem is that while directly piping water outside of the watershed is forbidden, bottling it then shipping doesn't fall under this definition. This is the loophole that needs to be closed.
The Muskegon River (the main drainage for the area) has a discharge of 1,450 cubic feet per second at Evart, Michigan (where this facility is located). That is about 11,000 gallons per second, or about 937 million gallons per day.
The facility proposes to pump about half a millon gallons per day.
I don't know the particulars in this case but is Nestlé going to pay proper amount for this water? If the public doesn't want the plant then shouldn't their desires carry some weight? Especially since it doesn't appear that Nestlé would be providing a service in the interests of society at large.
Overall there is a growing sense in the U.S. that public assets are being sold off at below market rates. That corporate interests trump public interests. There's a lack of trust in the system. The overreaction, as you put it, here seems to me to be a symptom of what I think is a growing lack of trust in the system.
Detroit is currently selling water for $23/thousand cubic feet, or about .000321/gallon. That's filtered, treated, and distributed to a tap in every home.
What do you imagine a fair price would be for untreated, pump-it-yourself groundwater?
When you pay for residential water, you're not actually paying for the water. You're paying infrastructure costs, the cost of running the pumping station and repairing the pipes to your house.
> I don't know the particulars in this case but is Nestlé going to pay proper amount for this water?
This is just a permit to draw water from a well, not a municipal drinking water supply. I suspect that (other than the permit fee) they aren't paying anything for the water. (I had a look at the permit & didn't see anything there about payments).
> I don't know the particulars in this case but is Nestlé going to pay proper amount for this water?
I suspect the value of untreated groundwater in Michigan is very, very small.
> there doesn't appear that Nestlé would be providing a service in the interests of society at large.
What about jobs? What about the people who want to buy bottled water? Why don't the workers and consumers count as "society at large"?
Note: I personally think most people who buy bottled water are foolish (unless the local tap water is unsafe or unpalatable), but then people do a lot of things I think are foolish.
> The watershed and the associated aquifer are where the river water comes from
Yes, that's where it comes from, but it doesn't fill up instantly. Depending on the depth and type of aquifer the well is tapping, it could actually take a very long time for the aquifer to refill (or it could refill very quickly).
Isn't that apples and oranges, comparing the numbers like that? The river is connected to the water table, sure, but surely the issue is more complicated than that?
I don't see how it could be more complicated. Any groundwater that isn't pumped out and used is going to eventually go down the river, right? Otherwise the area would be underwater.
Yeah, there are places where groundwater enters the aquifer from long distances away. Michigan is not one of those places. It gets plenty of precipitation.
1/2000 is a meaningless number because you don't know if hypothetically 2000/2000 of the flow is already assigned to other uses then there is zero left over and someone is losing out.
Hydro power for example uses 100% of the flow so removing that water directly reduces power output of downstream power plants.
The Muskegon feeds into the Lake Michigan which is thus upstream of Niagara Falls and a lot of hydro power generation. Granted we are not talking about a huge amount of energy, but it is one of many costs that are not being compensated.
Compare the amount of water they're taking out per day (576,000 gallons) to amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls in a day (about 54,345,600,000 gallons).
In the short term perhaps, but it's not going to take that long to hit 10,000$ worth of energy and again that's just one of many uses of this water which as far as I can tell is uncompensated.
Per the article, they already pump 360,000 gallons per day. So this dispute is about a an increase of just 216,000 gallons per day and it has taken them almost 2 years to go through the permit process.
For reference, an olympic sized swimming pool holds 660,000 gallons of water. So even after this increase, they are still drawing less than one pool's worth of water.
I feel like Nestle in particular draws heat for two reasons:
1) They are a global multinational and don't demonstrate much sympathy for local environmental issues
2) They are specifically bottling water, which seems wasteful as a practice in general, adds minimal value, etc.
I can't speak knowledgeably about #1 -- Nestle's track record probably speaks for itself -- but I do wonder about #2.
If a Anheuser Busch or Coca Cola wanted to open a manufacturing plant in Michigan consuming 576,000 gallons a day going to beer or soda, would it garner the same criticism? I feel like while there would still be discussions about rates charged for a public resource, the community at large would view beer or soda as a legitimate product for water, as opposed to bottled water.
Bottled water is just terrible. First, the fact that potable municipal water is so cheap that you can use a gallon of it to make your poop disappear is a miracle of modern civilization. Second, putting that same water in plastic bottles, driving it around the country, and selling it for $1-2/liter creates all sorts of environmental damage for absolutely no benefit.
Please, people, celebrate the benefits of living in the modern world: buy a canteen and fill it at your sink.
It seems to be a very American thing to drink bottled water when there's perfectly fine water in the tap (unless you live in Flint, MI).
I buy bottled water maybe once a fortnight, if that. The only time I buy it is if I'm out and about and don't have a ready supply of water. I buy the cheapest water I can get, which I'm fairly sure is bottled in the city straight from municipal supply.
I find the concept of buying water like San Pellegrino to be so absurd. There's all this perfectly fine water to drink here, and you ship it from the other side of the world? It's the highest form of wastefulness.
I know that we live in an outrage culture that doesn't respect orders of magnitude, but "he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"[1].
They propose to withdraw 0.5E6 gal/day. We have data for the state of Michigan (in 2004, but probably not too much different today)[2] If we're only talking about ground water, industrial is 89.1E6, irrigation is 197E6, and electric generation is 4.1E6 usage. Why is it OK for these uses of ground water, but not the much much higher value use of water that actual human beings drink? I suppose that not many people are dipping their flow meter into the power plant's water main and noticing the massive quantities of water that they use (and then return to the environment, just like Nestle). They do see the case of bottled water on the shelf though and get pissed off that some company is making money selling the fruits of a public resource.
To put it in perspective, in all of Michigan, total water usage is 11E9 gal/day. Nestle wants to use 0.5E6 gal/day. The population of Michigan is about 10E6, so they propose to make a giant factory that uses the same amount of water as 500 people. Somehow a giant plant using the same amount of water as 500 people attracts 80,000 negative comments. Go figure.
The issue is much more nuanced than that but nice job positioning protest, dissent and citizen concern ie basic democracy as 'outrage culture'. [1]
The bigger debate is about exploitation of natural resources , negatively impacting the local community and environment [2] corporate capture, people in neighboring towns not able to access clean water, all things that the average citizen is negatively impacted by.
Nestle, corporate shills and those paid to defend it defending it is logical. Individuals with no stake seeking to defend Nestle on the basis on volume extracted based entirely on Nestle's figures with no regulatory framework to independently verify actual extraction on the other hand is not.
Your first link is a generic article on progress and sustainability. The second does not show how much water is extracted by Nestle and its impact on the local environment and is based on 'self reported' figures. Here are far more updated perspectives on the issue.
You're comparing water usage for necessary infrastructure to the completely unnecessary, and wasteful, usage of bottling it for consumption. With a few rare exceptions, tap water in the US is safe for consumption. There is no good reason why this industry should exsit at this scale.
Government overrules the public on privatizing public resources despite near-unanimous opposition from the public that stands to "benefit": HN can barely muster a shrug.
Government overrules the public on something HN actually gives a shit about, like net neutrality, using the exact same process: HN calls for blood in the streets!
This is despite the fact Nestlé typically pays nothing (or an absurdly low amount) for the public resources it's selling, gets incredible tax breaks to create jobs, and then only creates on average 24 low-wage jobs that mostly go to non-local residents...
Can someone who knows more about this issue explain how Nestle bottling water has anything to do with lead in Flint's water or Detroit shutting off water to people who were delinquent on their bill? They seem totally unrelated. If Nestle didn't do this would it fix Flint's lead problem? Would it help people pay their water bills?
I don't see how these issues are connected other than "water in Michigan". Am I missing something?
But what are people outraged about? I see my comment has been on a rollercoaster of up and down votes so people obviously feel strongly but I still don't understand what the actual issue is.
This is not a useful comparison. It equates statewide use to a factory that will presumably source water from a focused area. What are the conditions like at the site of the factory? Can that site accommodate that intake? Is 0.5m the final scale of the factory?
Maybe it's not a big deal, maybe it is, but you can't use wide geographic generalizations like this to dismiss the concern.
4) The supply potential of the water source, considering quantity, quality, and reliability and safe yield of hydrologically interconnected water sources;
Application materials, extensive evaluation and consideration by staff, along with experience with the aquifer in the area, lead staff to conclude that the aquifer can sustain the proposed withdrawal without deleterious
effects to the dependent resources.
The ruckus and commotion by the public is just pointless and useless activism.
If you can't understand why there's so much ruckus and commotion by the public you shouldn't be calling it pointless or useless.
People are angry because of the disaster that was Flint. When government officials refuse to answer for large-scale disasters, people resort to other outlets and places to direct their anger. People are angry because they see corporations swooping in to bottle and sell more water in the same state where those people are suffering due to greed and failure.
> If you can't understand why there's so much ruckus and commotion by the public you shouldn't be calling it pointless or useless.
I can understand, but that doesn't make it any less pointless or useless.
> People are angry because of the disaster that was Flint. When government officials refuse to answer for large-scale disasters, people resort to other outlets and places to direct their anger. People are angry because they see corporations swooping in to bottle and sell more water in the same state where those people are suffering due to greed and failure.
Sure, and the two issues are disconnected. Not only that, but the protests and anger actually cause a loss of value to society and to the state.
And saying that this protest is pointless and useless doesn't mean I don't sympathize with those suffering at Flint.
Flint is not even close to the only issue. Locals are aware of the damage Nestle has already caused to the local ecosystem by dropping the water supply. There is also much worry that legal draw limits were not set with that area's situation in mind, but Nestle is pointing to the legal rate and saying everything will be okay.
4) The supply potential of the water source, considering quantity, quality, and reliability and safe yield of hydrologically interconnected water sources;
Application materials, extensive evaluation and consideration by staff, along with experience with the aquifer in the area, lead staff to conclude that the aquifer can sustain the proposed withdrawal without deleterious
effects to the dependent resources.
No problem, I happen to be very close with a professional environmental engineer. It is amazing the amount of work put into modeling environmental impact, especially on hydro models. A lot of the original models and methods still used today were developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Maybe their opinions were based on principle. I know you do not care, but your dismissal of 80k people you don't and will never know says volumes about you as a person.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong another commenter may be. We ban accounts that do this, so would you please not post like this again?
> I know you do not care, but your dismissal of 80k people you don't and will never know says volumes about you as a person.
Thanks for the ad hominem.
It isn't that I care or not, approving this well is a technical environmental decision, and shouldn't depend on how much people scream. It doesn't matter if there were 10 million people against it, the agency isn't there to evaluate public support for a project, it is there to evaluate the technical and environmental aspects of the project.
Don't let an angry crowd make technical decisions.
That wasn’t an ad hominem. The parent was making an observation—unnecessary as it may be and regardless of its accuracy—on your character based on your comments. The parent was not dismissing your argument based on or by switching to refuting it with a personal attack of your character.
> approving this well is a technical environmental decision, and shouldn't depend on how much people scream.
That's completely incorrect because the state is run by politically elected leadership who ultimately answer to the people. If the people hated Nestle because its factories were painted green, they have the right to complain and ultimately vote for leadership that would disallow Nestle to paint their factories green.
> That's completely incorrect because the state is run by politically elected leadership who ultimately answer to the people.
This isn't being voted by elected officials, this is being approved by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality following the standard procedure set in law by elected officials.
> If the people hated Nestle because its factories were painted green, they have the right to complain and ultimately vote for leadership that would disallow Nestle to paint their factories green.
Yes, and they should do so at the ballot or at their elected officials.
Or are you suggesting that any laws and regulations are legally void when 80k people comment against it?
> If the people hated Nestle because its factories were painted green, they have the right to complain and ultimately vote for leadership that would disallow Nestle to paint their factories green.
What if they didn't like Nestle hiring black people?
You have the right to complain, yes. That doesn't mean you automatically get your way. Not even if everyone votes for it.
again, the Civil Rights Act was passed by a politically elected congress.
Not sure why everyone is so upset by my post that essentially is reiterating, "the people have a right to be heard and they ultimately elect how their town/state/country is run".
You've been breaking the site guidelines by getting into flamewars. Please don't do that—it's just what we don't want here.
A comment like this one also breaks the guideline that says: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
The whole idea of Michigan being somehow desperately short of water is ridiculous on its face, by the way.
Not only does it get plenty of rainfall, it's surrounded on every side but the south by the friggin' Great Lakes. You guys have heard of those, right? You know, the ones that contain 21% of the freshwater in the entire world?
People keep mentioning Flint. Flint doesn't have a water shortage. It has crappy water due to an outdated water supply system.
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that it's weird that there are people opposed to bottling water. More that it's not very meaningful to compare the number of comments opposed to the number of comments in favor.
I notice a lot lately, maybe it has always been so, that some large powerful entity will insist that the citizen has been screwed over according to all proper procedures and applicable laws...
It reads more like that you shouldn’t expect the state to behave ethically if there is no legal obligation to do so, and that what is considered ethical and/or legal can change over time.
Defending potentially bad behaviour solely on the basis that it’s legal behaviour may not be the best defence (outside of a court of law.)
The point of the quote was to point out that laws aren't necessarily right.
And this point you keep making about it only being a small % of the total water isn't very convincing. I'm sure you would mind if I embezzled 1/2000th of Michigan's GDP.
Embezzling is a poor comparison. This is Nestle getting legal permits to pull from a well.
A better comparison would be if you invoiced Michigan for 1/2000th of their GDP and the state and local governments paid it. In that case, I'm fine with it.
This is arguing dishonestly, as you presumably understand the difference between using examples to illustrate a principle, and a direct comparison. Why not just address the point, instead of being “outraged” by his presentation?
He is arguing that the government of Michigan's laws are bad because the Nazis had bad laws.
There's dishonesty for you.
Yes, you’re being dishonest.
If you use the state as a metric for ethics you'll end up disappointed.
He spelled it out in the post you’re aggressively misinterpreting and it’s decidedly not the fiction you’re peddling. So are you really losing track of what’s been said, in which case it’s time to step back, or are you being dishonest? You don’t seem like you’re losing track, so...
I'm not "misinterpreting" anything, aggressively or otherwise.
He is lumping all states together as "the state", giving an example of some unethical states, and arguing from that that no state is ethical, or pays any attention to ethical concerns.
You said He is arguing that the government of Michigan's laws are bad because the Nazis had bad laws.
Which simply isn’t true. He actually said outright:
If you use the state as a metric for ethics you'll end up disappointed.
Now, you may think that’s garbage, but you’re not free to pretend that he said completely different things he didn’t actually say. Remember how you hate inaccuracy? Do you think that what you were doing before was accurate? How about playing semantic games now with the word “state,” is that accurate?
A government agency is similar to a court in that sense. It doesn't matter how many people want someone thrown in prison, the judge must have a reason based on existing law to do so.
It sounds like these comments were misdirected, and should have gone towards policy makers, not an agency that proclaims to only enforce existing policy.
Of course anything surrounding Michigan, Nestle and water is going to attract attention and serve as the backdrop for uninformed people to vent their anger. And despite all the backlash the adminstration followed the law and the right call was still made.
That's nice for Nestle, but ignores the fact that Flint is still having water quality problems and replacement of the lead-tainted pipes won't be complete until 2020. It's entirely reasonable that citizens would like their government to prioritize their wellbeing at the expense of regular procedure, considering that the Flint water crisis was a product of government error to start with.
This facility is over a hundred miles from Flint, and on a completely different watershed. In fact, the watershed drains into a completely different Great Lake (Lake Michigan rather than Lake Huron).
The problem is, at this point the "representation" is far too removed from the governed... Very few people "know" their representatives (local, state and federal alike). And the public image is very manipulated. Unfortunately, people no longer vote for who they feel is a better person, but who is in their party and has a better smile and message.
In the internet age, it's almost worse with the sheer amount of disinformation which cannot be contained or offset in both directions, for the better or the worse of a given candidate.
It's disillusioning and outright sad. That doesn't even account for external pressures and interests.
You can call a clod a cake, right? We don’t live in a democracy, we live in an indirectly federated republic. I’m this case a very badly corrupt one, run by plutocrats for longer than any of us have been alive.
Citizens of Michigan should get a check every year like they do in Alaska. This keeps happening because only Nestle and a few politicians get a cut and everyone with power is happy.
My city (in Michigan) charges large users of water 0.2 cents per gallon (~$2 per thousand, they charge small users more). That's for treated, metered tap water that they pump into a tower. So the cost includes distribution and such. Another town in Michigan charges something like 0.8 cents per gallon.
Under the new permit, Nestle will be pumping about 210 million gallons a year. At the going rate for clean water in Michigan, it's in the ballpark of $1 million dollars (or maybe $2 million), with 9 million residents.
Whether the water is being put to good/appropriate use is the much more important question than the saleable value of the water.
The difference is that Nestle is drilling and maintaining its own well, purifying the water itself, and distributing the water itself. All of those costs are factored in to what your city charges for water (and it's breathtaking just how expensive a network of pipes to every single house is).
I don't know what a fair price in Michigan for raw, untreated, drill-pump-and-distribute it yourself groundwater might be.
I'd be surprised it it were more than a cent per thousand gallons, though.
