Nestlé is opening a new bottling plant in Phoenix, Arizona. Seriously, Phoenix. Arizona. Arizona is the state that, for the first time in five years, is reportedly not going to have any areas of “severe drought.” Here’s University of Arizona Climatologist Mike Crimmins explaining how droughts work.
“The drought monitor is really tuned up for shorter termed seasonal drought,” Crimmins said. “It tries to represent longer term drought, but it really does represent that seasonal time scale much better. Arizona is still in the grips of a 15-year drought, but we’ve seen pretty good improvement across much of the state over the last few months.”
Crimmins explained that short-term drought had more to do with things like the condition of the soil for plant growth or dry vegetation. Long-term drought has more to do with ground water levels or the condition of large storage reservoirs.
Crimmins said he didn’t want to be an “all-around downer” with regards to the precipitation the state received earlier this month or the anticipated wet winter that is expected due largely to El Niño conditions.“Those (short-term) conditions can change very quickly,” Crimmins said. “Water resource-type droughts take a long time to develop and they take a long time to go away.”
[My emphasis, but seems you don’t “have to be a scientist” to know that that makes sense.]
Having heard the words “El Nino” and “not severe drought,” the Nestlé higher-ups walked out of their underground lair and set off to discover Phoenix, Arizona.
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With the city's economy now in recovery, the company's internal real estate unit started looking for a site in mid-2015, and leased a 395,000-square-foot facility in the western part of town in March. The company says that with a plant in Phoenix, it can cut down on the transportation costs of moving water into the region. Nestlé Waters North America has 29 water facilities in the U.S. and Canada. Estimates suggest the plant will create 40-50 jobs.
Nestlé's Switzer explained some of the main factors driving his company's site selection: water quantity, water quality, regulatory burdens, local concerns, and Nestlé's corporate perspective.
Not everyone is as excited about this match made in heaven.
Upon learning of the Phoenix plant in May, a community college student posted a petition to Change.org calling Nestlé Waters "irresponsible and unsustainable" given that the Grand Canyon State has officially been in a drought since 1999. A Facebookpage followed suit. In response to those concerns, the city water services department quickly called a public meeting. Held earlier this month at a verdant Audubon Society nature center south of downtown, the event pitted a passionate and knowledgeable city water wonk against a crowd of about 50 people ranging in temperament from screechy idealist to respectful skeptic. Tempers flared, with ample interruptions, but the picture presented was counterintuitive: a desert city with water to spare.
Phoenix produced about 95 billion gallons of water in 2015. It gets more than half from Arizona's Salt and Verde rivers, and a little less than that from a Colorado River diversion, some of which is piped into storage aquifers for emergency use. About 2 percent is groundwater. The Nestlé plant would use about 35 million gallons (or 264 million half-liter bottles) when it opens in the spring, or about 0.037 percent of the volume that comes out of the city's plants and wells. So with that kind of math, and all the demand for bottled water among thirsty Phoenicians, it looks like there's plenty to go around—even enough for Nestlé to pour out of the tap, bottle, and sell for a few bucks. The Arizona environmental community isn't so sure.
Nestlé has bottled water in Phoenix for some time now, for home and delivery service. What’s new is the big building they are going to build and how it has brought the wizard out from behind the green curtain.