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Podcast Episode 3 Transcript--Drinking City Water
RETEGO Labs is an authorized dealer of Crusader Water Systems. We’ve got the best test so we had to have the best water treatment systems. RETEGO tests for more than a dozen things that effect water quality from which we create a comprehensive profile. With that profile we work with Crusader Water Systems create a custom system designed just for you. It may surprise you to know that our tests reveal that each home has different water chemistry. The city sends you the same water as your neighbors but once it enters your home it changes. As it flows through different combinations of plumbing, fixtures, and treatment attempts the chemistry changes. Have you ever wondered why you don’t like your tap water but your neighbors water tastes just fine? Have you ever wondered why you seem to replace water heaters all the time and your neighbor doesn’t? It’s not bad luck…It’s just chemistry. Let RETEGO Labs take care of the chemistry so you can take care of your family. Together we can have perfect water.
Today we’ll spend a few minutes telling you a story. A water story. It’s also about other things but in the end we’ll talk about a term known to a few people, “Water Footprint.” It’s a useful term. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is used to describe the total volume of fresh water used to produce the products you use or the food you eat, or the services you enjoy. You’ll be amazed how much water is used.
After the civil war the nation reeled from the massive economic and physical damage. Most of the fighting happened in the south below the Mason Dixon line. Tens of thousands of had lost limbs during the war and were in constant pain from the amputations. Others suffered emotionally and physically from pain less apparent but no less real. It’s difficult for us to imagine the level of suffering today. On top of that the economy of the south had been based on agriculture and cotton was no longer king. The south needed to re-invent itself.
Living in the middle of this was an entrepreneur struggling to keep his business afloat named John Pemberton. He’s a civil war veteran and pharmacist. He was a creative genius but a terrible business man. He failed and restarted over and over. He was working to capitalize on the countries latest craze. Patent Medicine. You might have heard the term “Snake Oil Salesman.” This craze he was trying to cash in on was where this term came from.
The products sold promised crazy outcomes from baldness to cancer. I suppose it’s much like what we see today with the dietary supplement market but with absolutely no oversight. No one checked to see if what they claimed was in the product was actually there. So producers of these Patent Medicines could fill them with all kinds of toxic substances that you wouldn’t even use to clean your bathroom with much less eat or drink it! People were ingesting things like formaldehyde and borax. The rate of stomach cancer and stomach related issues were at an all-time high.
Pemberton had witnessed first hand how veterans suffered from constant pain from the wounds they received during the war. His personal suffering left him with his own struggle to keep from that addiction. That struggle produced a determination to create an alternative to morphine. He was certain he could produce something that would dull the pain without the addiction. He experimented with plants from around the world.
One leaf that had been used from thousands of years in South America showed promise. It was chewed or ingested by indigenous peoples during religious rights and as a way combat pain and fatigue. We know the extract today as cocaine. It was the latest miracle cure. Some wines were infused with it and, as you can imagine, became extremely popular. People just felt so good after that they were sure this was the cure for just about anything they suffered.
The strong African influence in the south introduced the population to plants and seeds indigenous to Africa but rarely seen in America. One particular seed showed promise but the combined flavor of these two extracts was extremely bitter. He knew it was going to be an obstacle to cashing in on the lucrative Patent Medicine craze. Without something to mask the bitterness no one would ever eat it. Pemberton began experimenting with all kinds of essential oils like lemon oil, lime oil, coriander, nutmeg oils, cinnamon oil and others. On top of that he added large amounts of sugar and eventually had a 7-ingredient concoction that was improving all the time.
Pemberton was steadily sliding deeper into despair working long hours into the night. His health suffered. Pain from his war wounds were a constant concern with the only fix being more of a problem than the pain itself. One day after having fallen asleep at his work bench, Pemberton woke up with an upset stomach. He grabbed a bottle of bicarbonate of soda to settle his stomach. After squirting some of it into the first glass he could reach, he downs it and to his astonishment, it tasted amazing! He realized that he’d put the soda water into his latest concoction of his Patent Medicine. He had it! With that final addition to his formula, he knew he had figured out a sellable formula.
He was exhausted and feeling like his creative genius was spent he wrote out a name. His exhausted, brain could think of nothing but just calling it by the names of the leaf and the seed that were the main ingredients. On May 8th, 1886 Pembertons’ creation was officially named Coca-Cola after the Coca Leaf and the Cola nut extracts. He wrote out the name by hand and added a little flair on the first “C” of the name intending to eventually do something more permanent. It was never changed and that iconic Coca-Cola symbol is essentially the handwriting of John Pemberton.
Of course, there’s much more to this story including the reason that most people have never heard of John Pemberton. I guess leave some comments if you’d like to know the rest of the story in a future podcast and I’ll work it in. What we’re interested in is what this has to do with water.
Benjamin Franklins once said. “When the wells dry, we know the value of water.”
At the beginning of this podcast I mentioned the term “water footprint.” It’s a useful term used to describe every drop of water used to make everything from selfie stick to a bottle of pop. It’s broken into three types of water:
- Green water is the moisture in the soil precipitation. It’s the water used by plants to grow.
- Blue water is freshwater from surface and groundwater sources.
- This would be the water in lakes and streams, glaciers and snow as well as natural underground aquifers.
- Grey water is polluted water that has had no contact with our toilet sewage. Grey water is from things like taking a bath, doing laundry washing your dishes and watering your yard and garden. This type of water can be recycled and reused, not for drinking, but for irrigation.
If you put all the water used from these three sources, Coke released its estimates public admitting that for half a liter of Coca Cola their green water footprint is 15 liters, the blue water footprint is 8 liters and the grey water footprint is 12 liters. That’s totals 35 Liters! So one 16 oz bottle of Coke uses nine and a quarter gallons of water before you buy one at the store.
If you take a look at the 10-K filing for Coca Cola you’ll find a list of the Raw Materials used to make Coca Cola. It’s a list shared with investors to list the main materials used to produce the product. In the 2002 filing they list the main ingredient as “High fructose corn syrup.” Water doesn’t even make the list. Jump forward to the 2009 report and the section begins quite differently. It says, “Water is the main ingredient in substantially all our products. While historically we have not experienced significant water supply difficulties, water is a limited resource in many parts of the world and our company recognizes water availability, quality and sustainability of that natural resource for both our operations and also the communities where we operate as one of the key challenges facing our business.”
So what happened?
Well, one thing that happened is as Coke expanded their sales around the world some of their new sales territories didn’t have a lot of water fresh water. You can imagine the stir that would cause if a significant number of local people couldn’t get a drink of fresh water but Coke is using huge amounts of local water to produce their product. Think of India. In India water is seen as a bounty given to them by the gods. Millions of pilgrims see the Ganges River as sacred. They take trip just to bathe in it. Now they see a company like Coke using it to make a soft drink.
There was another, more business-oriented reason. Many companies began to realize that they’d been foolish to ignore how they used water. For instance, IBM realized that for decades they’d spent many millions of dollars cooling down water in one section of the plant and many more millions heating the water in another section of the plant. It seems obvious, but no one had considered using that the hot water could be used to heat things and the cold water could be used to cool things. All of the sudden re-using and recycling water made business sense. Of course, it always had but no one saw it.
Big companies began to realize that efficient use of water was not only a good way to look green to the public, it made good business sense. Companies like IBM and GE reported they used 11 ounces of water to generate $1 of revenue. Coke needed 333 ounces of water to generate $1 of revenue. That’s just the water used in the actual manufacturing facility. Within the production plant they use 2.43 liters of water—1 liter for the drink and 1.41 liters for manufacturing, cleaning, and process water. That of course doesn’t count the other 33 Liters of water described in their water footprint but it’s an amount of water they could directly control so they decided to make an effort to reduce the amount. Their first effort to work on conserving water between 2004 and 2008 resulted in cutting the amount of process water per liter of drink by eight ounces. That doesn’t sound like much until you consider 67 million people per hour drink coke. That 8 ounces translated to 8 billion gallons of water in 2008.
Today Coca Cola not only sells Coke but also holds the rights to over 500 beverages including their popular Dasani water. And where does Dasani come from? The same tap water you use. They filter it, bottle it, and sell what cost’s 3 cents a gallon from the tap for about $12 a gallon at the convenience store. At the lab we’ve tested this water and while it’s free from anything bad it’s pretty free from anything good as well. There’s very little of the minerals needed for healthy water. Do you know what happens with water when it’s unbalanced and in need of minerals? It dissolves those minerals from anything available. I imagine their old slogan of “I want to buy the world a coke” has become “I want to sell the world a drink” of water, of soft drinks, of any other beverage you’re willing to buy.
Now I’m not an anti-corporate guy and I’m not intending to pick on Coke. In the end, we love our soft drinks….but we need our water. What I’ve chosen to do in my own home is put together a system that gives me the cleanest, healthiest, and best tasting water possible. I figured out a way to do that and paid the system off just by not buying bottled water all the time. It’s taken a bit to get my family to understand the water is the same. We’ve just gotten into the habit of thinking you need to open a new bottle of water for the water to be good. The old stuff, like one day old, is usually dumped in the pets dish or just thrown away. Here we have water in our toilets cleaner than a billion people worldwide can get and all we can think to do with day old water is throw it away of feed it to animals.
My youngest teenage daughter was the hardest to convert. She’s part of a generation that has grown up suspicious of what comes out of the tap. I started by buying her favorite bottled water—she liked the kind with the flip top. After each bottle was finished it would be discarded almost anywhere other than the trash—teenage life and all that. I would pick them up, refill them with the water from my custom system, then put it back in the refrigerator. She didn’t notice until she finally figured out there wasn’t that satisfying little snap as the plastic security threads released from that little ring around the bottle top. I actually considered gluing them back together to keep tricking her. I figured that would be too much of a dad thing to do. I mean, I’m already refilling water bottles. Instead, I pointed out that she had loved the water she was drinking and that she’d been drinking it for weeks. We now refill those bottles regularly. I want to eventually stop using them all together. I want each of us to have our own reusable bottles. That probably won’t be difficult. It’s been cool to buy those hydro flasks and companies used them as promotional items. I must have 12 of them in the back of my kitchen cabinets. I like the idea of not only saving money on water but saving the environment from the massive amounts of plastics each year. Almost 83 billion pounds a year are never recycled. They’re blowing around in fields, sitting in landfills, or floating in our water sources.
Many large companies around the world are beginning to recognize that a more thoughtful and intelligent approach to water use makes good business sense. We’re not going to change the world with a single podcast but we can begin the discussion. I’ve been surprised to realize that no one really sees themselves as having any relationship to water other than that they need to drink it or bathe in it. It’s quite literally the most important substance in our lives. Your grandparents or great grandparents never could take water for granted. If they did, they didn’t have water. The only reason we don’t think about it all the time is because there are those that work day and night to bring that clean water to you. We just need to begin to ask the questions.
Here’s one for you. “What’s the water like in the home you’re about to buy?” Did you know that home inspectors don’t check anything having to do with water quality? They check for damaged water heaters but not the damage the water is doing to the water heaters. They check for water damage but not damaged water. We’ll discuss this in a future podcast because knowing what I know now, I’d never buy a home without calling RETEGO to test the water. It’s that important.
Thanks so much for listening to todays’ story. I’ll try to find interesting stories to bring you and share the results of our water tests in the upcoming episodes.
Today we’ve touched briefly on a story about the creation of one of the worlds largest beverage providers and their recent acknowledgment of the importance of water as a business strategy. These huge corporations measure everything and that’s how they know just how deeply attention to water effects the bottom line. In our homes we don’t really have that level of attention. If we did we’d do a lot of things different. If you knew how much it was costing you to ignore water you’d be amazed. I’ll leave you with this…It costs the average family of 4 $250 a month to ignore their water. That doesn’t even factor in the money spent on bottled water. When the costs are actually measured the same way big business does, it’s that expensive.
