A Paragraph to Ponder

I found this interesting in a book review (Nature's Fortune by Mark Tercek and Jonathan Adams) in the April 4, 2013 issue of the Financial Times:

"Heavily water-dependent Coca-Cola, for instance, has vowed that by 2020, it will return to communities as much water as it uses to make its beverages.  Pepsi says it will put back more water than it uses."

It would be nice to see the water balance for a typical Coke bottling plant - - just to see how you can do this.  The key term in the goal is probably ". . . uses to make its beverages" versus the total water including that in Coke itself.

Coke does have a massive effort in responsible and sustainable water stewardship - link to excellent information about what Coke is thinking and going in the context of water sustainability.  Many companies in similar water intensive industries and water resource risk locations ought to take note of Coke's efforts in developing water vulnerability assessments at all of their locations.  These types of risk based assessments will be extremely important and insighful in the era of extreme weather events.

This is picky, but in the section on "Recycling Wastewater" - Coke presents data on 5-day "Biological Oxygen Demand."  There is no such thing as biological oxygen demand - - it is "Biochemical Oxygen Demand."