The Dutch news website nos.nl referred to a critical message posted by The Verge. The message concerned the amount of water that is required to produce one liter of regular Coca-Cola. The Verge found that Coca-Cola lied: it wasn’t two liters, but seventy. The majority of the water is used to produce the abundant amount of sugar that gives soda-waters such a bad reputation.
Interesting though the ‘news’ might be, a few questions remain:
– How about Cola Zero or Pepsi Max for that matter, which does not contain any sugar?
– How much water is needed to produce the PET- and glass bottles that contain the drink (including the caps)? And the removal of these?
– How much water is needed to build, maintain and operate the machines which are required to produce the drink and the bottles?
– How much water is needed for storage, transport, and distribution?
– How much water is needed to consume the drink?
– How much water is needed to keep all the people at work who earn (in part) their daily living from the drink?
– How much do the users of water have to pay? And who gets the bill, eventually? The consumer?
– Moreover, what happens with all that water after it has been used? Water is never lost. But where does it go? Does it evaporate?
All relatively important questions, specifically in respect to the core issue: how much water does it take to produce the alternative, like a glass of water or a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of beer or wine? No insights there.
As it appears, The Verge is a commercial company of relatively young people, that mines money for editorials, more specifically of very large enterprises that produce and sell ICT hardware and software like Xiaomi, Sony, Alibaba, Google, Amazon, Youtube, Canon, Microsoft, Apple, Ubisoft, Ticketfly, Kayak, Xbox.
So the meta-question is: Why, between all those jubilant stories on high-tech, a negative one on Coca-Cola? To cover up the truly devastating sustainability account of these self-proclaimed high-tech companies? How much water is required to be able to ‘consume’ an apple mobile phone? And, what is the Dutch connection between The Verge and nos.nl? Why does a relatively obscure Dutch news website take over ‘news’ from a commercial company without even informing the readers about this?
^tvo