Arizona’s capital, in the midst of an epic drought, could be home to Nestlé’s newest water bottling plant.

According to the Associated Press, Nestlé Waters will treat the city’s tap water and bottle it under its Pure Life brand. The plan is to extract about 35 million gallons of water in its first year to produce 264 million half-liter bottles. (emphasis added)

The city’s water services department insists there’s enough water to spare, even though Arizona is in the midst of a historic drought. As Bloomberg writes:

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 […]