Starbucks is Moving Its Bottled Water Business Out of Drought-Stricken California

[Divernan]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by TexasTowelie (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Think Progress

Last month, Starbucks came under fire for its bottled water business. An investigation by Mother Jones magazine found that Ethos — the Starbucks-owned water brand created “to help fix the global water crisis” — was sucking groundwater out of a California county in exceptional drought, and making a lot of money doing it.

Now, ostensibly in response to that criticism, Starbucks has announced that it will stop doing that. The company said it would move the sourcing and manufacturing of Ethos water out of California and into Pennsylvania. Moving the entire West Coast operation cross-country would take about six months, it said.

As Mother Jones pointed out in its investigation, the area where Starbucks has been sourcing and bottling its Ethos water for the West Coast has been in severe drought for years. “Placer County, where Ethos’ spring water is drawn, was already declared a natural disaster area by the USDA because of the drought back in 2012,” the article reads. “Merced County, where the bottling facility is located, declared a local emergency due to drought more than a year ago, as ‘extremely dry conditions have persisted since 2012.'” Last month, Placer County declared a water shortage emergency.

Now, Starbucks says it will move its California operations to Pennsylvania, which currently provides the East Coast with its Ethos water. But Pennsylvania also has a drought problem. While nowhere near as bad as California’s, the state Department of Environmental Protection recently issued a drought watch for 27 counties, including the one where Ethos operates.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/11/3657262/starbucks-dumps-california-bottled-water-drought/

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Good luck to Starbucks in finding and utilizing springs not at risk of ground water contamination from Pennsylvania's fracking operations!

[villager]

1. Not sure how many people will want to buy "Fracktos" drinking water...

...once the word gets out...

[SunSeeker]

2. K & R

[bvar22]

3. Guess they don't know about the fracking in Pennsylvania,

I hope they are happy there.
We sure don't want them coming here.

[Xithras]

4. The unfortunate part of this...

...is that Merced County is already among the most poverty stricken locales in the nation and is a hispanic majority county (meaning that hispanics comprise more than 50% of the population). Both the county and the state have invested a lot of time and effort to attract non-agricultural work to the region in an attempt to relieve the areas devastatingly high chronic unemployment rate (the unemployment rate in Merced County is worse than the unemployment rate in Detroit or Appalachia.)

And now, at the same time the lack of irrigation water is gutting the local ag economy, the same drought is chasing these hard-won non ag jobs out of the region as well.

[LiberalElite]

5. Why doesn't Strfks use some "ethos" and get

out of the bottled water business? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos

[TexasTowelie]

6. Locking thread.

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