polyethelene teraphthalate
A solution for Hong Kong’s plastic waste crisis: Turn it into fuel.
A wide range of plastics cannot be recycled, or cannot be recycled any further, and end up in a landfill. Such plastics are an excellent, high energy feedstock for gasification.
July was a critical month for plastic pollution. Plastic waste now has catastrophic implications for Hong Kong, and the planet. In July, a study by the University of California, Santa Barbara provided the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics. Media reports said plastic threatened a “near permanent contamination of the natural environment”, and called the threat a “crisis comparable to climate change”.
The amount of plastic created since 1950 had increased exponentially, from 2 million tonnes to 8.3 billion tonnes in 2017, and is projected to reach 34 billion tonnes by 2050. We are creating a problem that cannot go away: the study found that, in 2015, of the nearly seven billion tonnes of plastic waste generated, only 9 per cent was recycled, 12 per cent incinerated, and 79 per cent accumulated in landfills or the environment.
The devastating impact of plastics on the marine environment can be seen in the many internet videos showing whales, turtles and sea birds killed by ingesting plastic in the sea. The intrusion of plastics into the food chain on both sea and land is well documented.
This July, Hong Kong had unusually high rainfall, which resulted in a visible increase in plastics washed into our waters. Several non-governmental organisations and community groups have been cleaning up beaches; much of the rubbish is plastic.
While their efforts are necessary and laudable, they are also futile. They have an insignificant impact on the total problem and create another – what to do with the collected plastic?
Hong Kong’s recent attempts to reduce municipal solid waste and increase recycling make a sorry story. An Audit Commission report in 2015 noted that the government had failed to reach its targets and policy objectives in a range of project areas, including waste separation at source, waste charging and recycling.
The introduction of a charge for plastic shopping bags has started to change attitudes about the unnecessary use of plastic, yet the actual reduction in quantities delivered to landfills could not be adequately quantified.
One issue was the import and export of plastic waste – some of which was being dumped in our landfills and some exported as recycled material.
None of the figures add up, but it appears as if more plastic is being dumped in Hong Kong than we actually generate.
The audit report said that, in 2014, the Environmental Protection Department noted the unattractiveness of the plastic-recycling trade, pointing out that it was “highly vulnerable” to changes in supply and demand, and to mainland waste and recycling policies.
That observation was proved right in July when China told the World Trade Organisation that it would stop accepting any imports of plastic waste.
In recent pieces in these pages, Edwin Lau, executive director of The Green Earth, noted a disappointing decline in plastic recycling – from 1.58 million tonnes in 2010 to 93,900 tonnes in 2015 – and warned that a serious waste crisis would hit Hong Kong within a few months, as the main market for Hong Kong recyclers – that is, the mainland – would be closed.
Hong Kong already discards 206 tonnes of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic and non-PET plastic bottles every day. With recycling rates dropping, this would place even greater demands on the limited space in landfills.
In April, Hong Kong legislators noted with “grave concern” the government’s failure to meet waste targets and called on it to facilitate and increase the recovery of plastic recyclables, and promote the sustainable development of the waste plastic recycling industry.
The administration’s response does not recognise the significance of the issue, and the inadequacy of their measures to meet the waste disposal catastrophe. Hong Kong has a huge challenge on its hands: massive growth in plastic production worldwide; minimal recycling of plastic; the closure of a major market for recycled plastic; and our only option – landfills – are reaching capacity with no alternatives in sight.
Hong Kong has a major crisis fast approaching regarding plastic and other waste. A new approach using advanced technology and high-capacity solutions needs to be adopted quickly. The amount of waste going to landfills must be reduced dramatically.
We need a new approach.
Fundamentally, the use of plastic needs to be banned by law, where reasonable and other alternatives are available. It should be taxed to price it out of consideration for other uses.
The public must reduce plastic use, and organisations and companies must take steps to ensure that this happens. The simple banning of single-use plastic water bottles by some organisations has been effective in Hong Kong, as refillable alternatives for water can easily be provided.
However, the events of July have shown that these efforts, though necessary, are unlikely to have a significant impact. The market for recycling plastic is collapsing and an alternative must be found which can remove 90 per cent of the plastic used in Hong Kong from the environment.
In this, Hong Kong can be an innovation leader, using its financial, scientific and engineering expertise.
Under the new regulatory agreements the government reached with Hong Kong’s two power suppliers recently, it is now possible for other generators of electricity to be paid for supplying power to the grid. This creates an opportunity for it to be supplied from waste plastic.
The use of gas plasma technology for the treatment of municipal solid waste has relatively long periods of operating success in Japan, China, Europe and the US. While there are mixed reviews of this technology on general waste, similar to that dumped in our landfills, it has proved to be more successful where the fuel source is of a consistent nature.
The use of plastic as a single fuel source, for example, has proved successful. This way, we can dispose of the plastic and generate energy as gas or electricity at the same time.
Gasification is not incineration, but is the use of extreme heat to convert the feedstock into their simplest molecules – carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane – forming a synthetic gas which can then be used for generating electricity or producing valuable products. This “syngas” can be used in turbines to generate electricity or further processed to produce substitute natural gas, chemicals, fertilisers or transport fuels, such as ethanol.
A wide range of plastics cannot be recycled, or cannot be recycled any further, and end up in a landfill. Such plastics are an excellent, high energy feedstock for gasification.
Gasification can take place in relatively small regional plants, which could be located in our industrial areas or industrial parks. They have proven records of not producing pollutants that could affect surrounding neighbourhoods.
Since July, plastic can no longer be regarded as a waste material that can be recycled in the traditional ways. The economic model of using it as a material for new materials and products no longer works.
Plastic must now be seen as a fuel to generate energy. It should be bought like other fuel sources, creating a market demand. To eliminate the inestimable cost of having plastic polluting the seas, the land, and using up our landfills, the government should buy plastic as feedstock for plasma gasification plants.
The principle of government subsidising a recycling industry already exists. The difference is that the government needs to quickly approve several gasification plants and create a market for plastics as fuel, a consistent market which gives our collectors and recyclers certainty as to where they can sell their product.
Demand for energy from new sources which don’t produce large amounts of carbon dioxide needs to be fully utilised. Plastics can provide that fuel while addressing a major pollution catastrophe.
Ian Brownlee is managing director of Masterplan Limited, a planning and development consultancy which has prepared submissions for NGOs on alternative waste management options for Hong Kong
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4 bacteria capable of reversing climate change by eating pollution.
Such bacteria might not only be able to take care of the 300 million tons of plastic produced around the world but even heavy metals such as Cadmium, which is used in nuclear reactors.
Genetically modified bacteria might hold the key to reversing climate change by reversing environmental contamination by pollutants. Such bacteria might not only be able to take care of the 300 million tons of plastic produced around the world but even heavy metals such as Cadmium, which is used in nuclear reactors.
We are producing pollutants at an alarming rate — according Ben Gurion University scientists, the weight of plastic containers in the ocean might be equal to the weight of fish in it by 2050. This is why some genetically modified bacteria might be the out-of-the-box solution for pollution, which in turn causes climate change by contaminating the environment and might even threaten the survival of mankind.
Here are four different bacteria, which might help reverse pollution by eating pollution and degrading pollutants:
Air-pollution eating and fuel generating bacteria: Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, have genetically reprogrammed bacteria to consume carbon dioxide from environment and produce sugars needed to build its body mass. The modified form of the bacterium E.Coli can be modified to produce the enzyme RuBisCo. The study found that the bacteria can be trained to consume CO2 and use it to create its body mass, including all the sugars needed to stay alive.
Pollution eating, electricity generating bacteria: Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina have discovered bacteria called the Desulfitobacteria, which can break down environmental pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls and chemical solvents and convert them into electricity.
"These bacteria are very diverse in their metabolic capabilities, including the food that they can consume. That means that these bacteria can convert a large number of different food sources into electricity. The technology could be used to assist in the reclamation of wastewaters, thereby resulting in the removal of waste and generation of electricity," Charles, Milliken, one of the researchers associated with the study explained.
The bacteria can handle conditions such as extreme heat and radiation and even lack of water.
Plastic-eating bacteria: Researchers at the Ben Gurion Institute of Science, Israel, have developed bacteria called Pseudomonas putida, which can be genetically modified to eat polyethylene-terephthalate (PET), the most common kind of plastic polluting the oceans and land.
Plastic is one of the biggest pollutants and does not degrade easily — an average bottle of mineral water takes half a millennium to decompose. The bacterium uses plastic as a carbon source and breaks it down using engineered enzymes.
Heavy Metal eating bacteria: Heavy metals such as cadmium are hard to break down using natural resources. But there might be a simple solution to the problem — genetically modified yeast. It uses a cell membrane called ‘anchor’ along with peptides, which bind with heavy metals and cleans up metal ions without harmful aftereffects.
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Science in America.
A century ago Albert Einstein laid the theoretical foundation for the laser. Many will argue that all science should be practical, with tangible stated benefits to society. But history shows this posture to be frankly, naïve. When Einstein derived his equations, I’d bet neither he nor anyone else was thinking “Barcodes!” or “Lasik Surgery!” or “Rock Concerts!”
Science in America
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON·FRIDAY, APRIL 21, 2017
By Neil deGrasse Tyson
A century ago Albert Einstein laid the theoretical foundation for the laser. Many will argue that all science should be practical, with tangible stated benefits to society. But history shows this posture to be frankly, naïve. When Einstein derived his equations, I’d bet neither he nor anyone else was thinking “Barcodes!” or “Lasik Surgery!” or “Rock Concerts!”
Consider the 1920s, when quantum physics was discovered. It was obscure and esoteric in its day, but now, there’s no creation, storage, or retrieval of digital information without an understanding of the quantum. By some measures, IT drives more than one third of the world’s GDP. Delay that research two decades, you might only now be getting your first email account. Cancel it altogether for being frivolous, and the AM radio continues as a major item of furniture in your living room.
Science has only one goal: to determine the world’s objective truths. Meanwhile, like anybody else, scientists are susceptible to bias that can distort one’s own observations and judgments. Self-aware, scientists specifically constructed methods and tools to minimize, if not remove entirely, the chance that a researcher thinks something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Furthermore, you’re famous overnight if you can show conclusively that someone else’s idea is wrong. Yes, the entire enterprise thrives on built-in, error-checking mechanisms.
This means scientific truths emerge by consensus — not of opinion, but of observations and measurements — rendering the research that falls outside of consensus the shakiest possible grounds on which to base policy. Politics is not a foundation on which you base your science. Science is a foundation on which you base your politics, lest you undermine a functioning, informed democracy.
In 1862 Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, understood this. A time when he clearly had other concerns, Lincoln creates the Land-grant university system, transforming education and agriculture in America. And in 1863 he creates the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an independent, multidisciplinary group of researchers tasked with advising our government in all ways science matters to its needs.
With the help of Congress, the run of US presidents with enlightened scientific foresight through the 20th century crosses the left-right political aisle like an Alpine slalom skier:
In 1916 Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, creates the National Park Service, an idea championed by Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.
In 1930 Herbert Hoover, a Republican, creates the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Harry S Truman, a Democrat, creates the the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950.
In 1958 Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
In 1962 John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, announces we’re going to explore the Moon. We do that, and discover Earth for the first time.
In 1970, with Mother Earth now on our radar, President Nixon, a Republican, creates the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and later that year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In the mid 1990s, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, boosts R&D; funding that enables an exponential growth of the internet, as tens of millions of Americans come on line.
The creation of the NSF deserves some exposition. It was inspired by the 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier. Written by Truman’s science advisor Vannevar Bush, the report compellingly argues for government-funded science as a driver of our wealth, our health, and our security. He further notes, “A nation which depends on others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.” Bush also observed, “In 1939 millions of people were employed in industries which did not even exist at the close of the last war.” America in the 20th century would become the world’s largest economy, leading in every important category of innovation and production.
Meanwhile, did you ever wonder who conducts science in America? From 1900 onwards, on average about 10% of Americans have been first-generation immigrants. Yet first-generation immigrants have won 33% of all American Nobel prizes in the sciences since the award began in 1900, representing thirty-five countries from six continents. So immigrants to America are three times more productive at winning Nobel prizes than population statistics would predict.
Do you prefer one branch of science over another because you think its discoveries will be more useful in coming years? Consider that in hospitals, every machine with an on/off switch that diagnoses your health without first cutting you open, is based on one or more principles of physics, discovered by physicists and chemists who had no specific interest in medicine. This includes the MRI, PET scans, CT Scans, EKGs, EEGs, ultrasound, and of course, good old fashioned X-rays. So if you defund one line of research in favor of another, you thwart the entire moving frontier of discovery. In the end, nature cross-pollinates all sciences, so perhaps we should too.
To reclaim America’s greatness, anyone with business acumen could think of science investments within our various government agencies as the R&D; of a corporation called the USA. Science is not a Liberal Conspiracy. It’s not even bi-partisan. Science is a fundamentally non-partisan enterprise that serves us all. Without it, watch America fade from relevance on the world stage, as we gasp for an era of scientifically enlightened governance to rise once again.
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What will it take for us to pay attention to climate change?
Climate change is not some nebulous political game that might affect our grandchildren. To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now.
Australia's coastline has seen massive changes in the past six months, 2015 was recorded as the hottest year on record, and 2016 is shaping up to be even hotter. Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bob Beale laments that nobody seems to be taking any notice.
My Facebook page prompts me to say what is on my mind. Actually I'm feeling quite wretched. I have a very bad dose of solastalgia, a term coined by my friend Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher.
Solastalgia is feeling homesick while you are still at home, a melancholy brought on by the loss or degradation of a treasured environment. My solastalgia is for my country, indeed for my whole planet. I'm asking myself, what exactly does Earth need to do to get our attention?
To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this.
No, really, what the heckedy-heck does it take to make us truly sit up and notice the massive changes going on in the natural world around us? It's a travesty that so many people are fixated by staring at their so-called smart phones in a search for imaginary Pokémon creatures, while the real plants and animals of the world are turning up their toes in their billions.
Look what has been happening lately around Australia's coastline alone. If our home is girt by sea, as our national anthem says, then all the signs are that we are effectively burning the floorboards. Disaster after disaster is happening.
Think I'm being alarmist? Well, think about this—off Queensland, more than nine-tenths of the Great Barrier Reef has just been bleached. Perhaps a quarter of it has died and likely won't come back.
Look up north in the Gulf—the worst mass die-off of mangroves ever seen, 10,000 hectares of it along great lengths of the coast. Look off Western Australia—960 square kilometres of kelp forest has just disappeared. More than a third of it is now extinct. And all of this has become evident in just the past six months alone. It's as if our oceans have just suffered a massive stroke.
And don't get me started about the terrible decline in bird populations around our shorelines, or about the rapid southward shift of tropical and subtropical fish, seaweeds and urchins. We are finding Nemo in Tasmanian waters!
And don't mention the millions of tonnes of man-made polymer waste materials, PET bottles, caps, bags, disposable plates, wrappers, you name it, that enter our oceans every year, turning them into one great plastic soup. The sand on every single Australian beach is now made up in part of countless grains of plastic. I could go on—but what's the point?
I know I'm far from alone in being aghast about all this. But if the list I have just reeled off hasn't got Australians off their butt demanding action and marching in the streets, I don't know what will.
So friends, I ask again, what will it take?
Climate records are falling with menacing regularity. In recent years we've broken record after record for heat, extreme rain and other disruptive weather events. Last spring we broke heat records. Last summer we had searing heat waves, and extreme temperatures smashed records across south-eastern Australian, followed by our warmest autumn on record.
Sea surface temperatures have been going off the charts as well. The world in general has been cooking too, with June being the hottest month ever recorded globally. 2015 was the warmest year on record, beating the previous mark set in 2014, and now 2016 is likely to break the record again.
Climate change is not some nebulous political game that might affect our grandchildren. To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this. Yet climate change was not even mentioned in the Turnbull government's first budget in May. Not a word, not a sausage. Such assiduous avoidance. Incredible, isn't it?
Worse still, that same budget gouged $1.3 billion in funds away from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. You have to ask, what on earth were they thinking? And climate change barely caused a flicker of debate in our recent federal election as well.
Instead we were fobbed off yet again by the major parties, and now we have Pauline Hanson elected once again on a platform of outright denial of climate science, to nourish fresh cankers of complacency and social division in our Parliament.
The real border security issue is the appalling damage we ourselves are doing to our coasts and oceans. The real negative gearing is the one we've been imposing on our planet. And the real superannuation problem is the squandering of natural resources, consumption for consumption's sake, at the expense of our kids and grandchildren.
Our civic leaders, our intellectuals, our politicians, and our mass media are playing Pokémon Go with us. When we try to reflect on, to consider and absorb the significance and meaning of these disasters, they blur our field of view by invoking phantoms to distract us. Indeed, they are worse than negligent, they are complicit. They know what needs to be done, but it's so much easier to deflect, distract, deny and delay.
Here's a word I just made up to describe our politicians in action on climate change—stagnertia.
A pox on all of them. A pox on them for leaving unattended and untreated the raging fever afflicting our planet.
One more time I ask, what will it take?
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Nestlé discovers water in the Arizona desert, and bottles it.
Despite a 17-year drought, Phoenix has welcomed the sale of its water as a consumer product—but for how long?
A Nestlé bottling unit is opening a new plant in drought-stricken Phoenix because that's where the water is. Really.
Drought? Desert? Water? The pure dissonance provoked understandable controversy among the sand-lubbers who make up one of the top three U.S. markets in per capita water-bottle-swigging.
"It's hard for people to hold in their minds," said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Water Center at Arizona State University. "Those two things don't seem compatible." And yet the question remains—how can they bottle water in the desert?
The Nestlé Waters North America facility slated for western Phoenix is nearing fruition amid a series of higher-pitched battles the company has faced elsewhere. Three environmental groups have sued the U.S. Forest Service for letting Nestlé continue to bottle in the San Bernardino Mountains. Last month, Hood River County, Ore., voted in favor of an anti-bottling measure, plugging up a proposed Nestlé facility. And persistent community opposition in tiny Eldred Township, Pa., led the company to drop plans for a plant there.
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 Facebook page 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.
Plastic bottles and black swans
In America, single-serving bottles of water recorded 40 straight quarters of 20 percent growth or more starting in 1995, a decade long run during which the product went from novelty to mainstay, visible in almost every conceivable setting. Though its overall growth has dropped since then, Michael Bellas of Beverage Marketing Corp. said this year may mark a more telling milestone: Water sales are expected to surpass soda sales for the first time.
Bottled water tends to draw opposition for at least two reasons. One is the removal of water from local ecosystems or reservoirs. Another is the plastic: Bottles too often find their way to unintended repositories like the great Pacific garbage patch. Nestlé Waters has promoted "closed-loop" recycling, which would keep the same polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic in distribution and out of landfills. "It is regarded as a symbol," said Nelson Switzer, chief sustainability officer of Nestlé Waters, of plastic bottles. "And so how do you manage when you are a symbol?"
Beyond the bottles and pledges of recycling, Phoenix's environmental advocates say they're frustrated with a local economy that has long been dominated by real estate development. They contend that, in Phoenix, it's considered heresy to even question development, and that in the case of the Nestlé Waters plant, economic growth has triumphed over common sense.
"People don't trust the city and they have reason not to," said Steve Brittle, president of Don't Waste Arizona. "This Nestlé thing has reawakened discussion."
At a City Council policy briefing on June 21, the Nestlé plant didn't come up. During a periodic state-of-the-water presentation, Phoenix Water Services Director Kathryn Sorensen, who holds a Ph.D. in resource economics from Texas A&M; University, did, however, describe the city's lifelong obsession with water, the structures built to protect it, and the risks ahead. She said that managing Phoenix's water for future dry spells isn't enough. The city of more than 1.5 million people needs to invest in the infrastructure that moves water where it's needed, particularly in emergencies.
A 1980 law made Arizona the first state to tie real estate development to water availability. Consequently, Phoenix has spent the last generation changing the way it manages water, by using much less groundwater, securing a share of the Colorado River, and taking conservation measures, like discouraging Northeastern suburb-style lawns in the Sonoran Desert. As a result, the city uses about the same amount of water as 25 years ago, when its population counted 400,000 fewer people.
Everybody wants to avoid a scenario in which high-end demand projections intersect with low-end supply projections: a black swan crisis. To drive the point home, Sorensen adds an animated black swan to her chart of water supply and demand projections.
It's easy to see how things might go wrong, because they may already be starting to. Lake Mead, the repository for Colorado River water that sits between Nevada and Arizona behind the Hoover Dam, is seeing dangerously low levels, with a better than 50 percent chance that emergency measures will kick in within two years. Phoenix could absorb the 320,000 acre-foot "tier 1" cut with limited hits to water-banking and agriculture, according to the city water department. (An acre-foot sounds like what it is, an acre of water 1 foot deep.) Further cuts await if levels continue to drop. In a worst-case scenario, the city believes that it has the groundwater equivalent of about 35 years of its Colorado River supply.
“Once we enter into shortage, it’s really important to note that shortage will probably become the new normal," Sorensen told the city leaders. "Once we go into shortage conditions, it’s relatively difficult to get back out. The good news, though, for us is really there’s no impact to us on our water supplies at least for quite some time to come. And even then, we have resiliency in supplies that we can fall back on."
Why Phoenix?
Into this oasis walked Nestlé Waters. Phoenix initially caught the company's attention for single-serve bottling about 10 years ago, according to Rita Maguire, a former Arizona water department chief, who now counsels the company on state and local water law. Then the housing crash hit Phoenix particularly hard and Nestlé moved on to other projects elsewhere.
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.
"We want to be where people want us," Switzer said. Gauging a community's welcome (or lack thereof) is a part of the process. "If all of those things together make sense, then we can site." The company said water scarcity is a real concern, and "in areas where population growth is threatening to exceed available water supplies, the concern is heightened.”
Despite the drought, environmentalist outrage, and the popular vision of Phoenix as a massive, baking asphalt grid, the city made a point of promoting the sustainability of the Nestlé plant.
For its part, Nestlé said it's bottled water in Phoenix for its home and office delivery service since 1987. Pepsi Bottling Co., Niagara Bottling, and DS Services of America also call Phoenix home, along with other smaller facilities. They use water on a scale similar to the Nestlé plant, according to the city's water services department. The Nestlé Waters plant may expand in later years.
Nevertheless, the sheer optics of a water-bottling facility in Phoenix touched off a local debate about how America's sixth-biggest city will be able to continue quenching its thirst. Sorensen, the water services director, noted that people have been living in desert cities longer than in temperate cities. But she conceded that the future is, well, cloudy.
"We know climate change will have an impact on us," she told the mayor and other council members. "We don’t know how or to what extent, but we know it won’t be good."
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