The Insanity of Bottled Water, Profits and The Company You Love To Hate

Not content with bottling water in drought-stricken California, Nestle has added Colorado to its water empire: the world's largest food and beverage company has been draining millions of gallons of water from the Arkansas River out of a pipeline near Buena Vista. The water is taken from a pipeline and loaded into tanker trucks and taken to the Nestle bottling plant in Denver.
There the water is used to fill hundreds and thousands and millions of little plastic Arrowhead Springs water bottles, which are then trucked to convenience markets, grocery stores, movie theaters and sports palaces around the West. Each month, Nestle fills roughly 40.4 million 16.9 ounce bottles.

It's not just Colorado that is affected. With 65 million gallons a year being pumped out of the river, there will be long term impacts to Colorado and downstream. The Arkansas River also flows through Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, areas that have also suffered major droughts recently.
The Colorado proposal elicited fierce opposition from many residents, who feared the company would deplete the local aquifer and that its trucks hauling the water to Denver would snarl traffic on mountain roads.
There's plenty of evidence to show that Nestle's habits are destructive of small communities.
The non-profit Stop Nestle Waters has gathered evidence from the 50 spring sites that Nestle operates around the country, and here's what they found:

Nestle's predatory tactics in rural communities divide small towns and pit residents against each other. Nestle reaps huge profits from the water they extract from rural communities – which are left to deal with the damage to watersheds, increases in pollution and the loss of their quiet rural lifestyle. Because Nestle has a pattern of bludgeoning small communities and opponents with lawsuits and interfering in local elections to gain control of local water supplies.

Not only that, but profits continue to rise. Currently, the annual spending on bottled water in the U.S. is $11.8 billion, while the global sales revenue from bottled water is $60 billion.
In the United States, an estimated 30 billion plastic bottles are sold annually, bottles that it takes at least 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture (enough to fuel about 100,000 cars for the entire year). The average number of plastic bottles used per person each year in the United States is 167.
On an even more depressing side note, nearly 8 out of every 10 of those bottles ends up in a landfill, translating to about a 23 percent recycling rate.

taken from here