Merced's Water Bottled By Safeway

Most bottled waters are nothing more than tap water run through an additional RO process...

then marked up 500 to 4000% to the uninformed consumer... To cut budget deficits, perhaps Cape Coral could bottle its own water and sell it at a profit?

Excerpts from Merced Sun Star

The Safeway Inc.'s water bottling plant in Merced -- one of the top five commercial/industrial water users in the city...

which bottles Safeway's in-house purified and spring water brand Refreshe -- uses roughly 50,000 gallons a day, five days a week, for its bottling operation.

The plant, which provides most "Refreshe" water to Safeway stores in the state, filters city water, puts it in bottles and sells it as purified water.

In Safeway's case they pay more than $1,000 a month for more than a million gallons of water.

The retail cost for that much purified bottled water at Safeway is just under $3 million.

The city pumps about 21 million gallons of water a day, and Safeway uses 50,000, that works out to be 0.238 percent of the total gallons pumped.

But the plant doesn't only use water. It also produces waste.

The plant's purification process discharges roughly 52,000 pounds of salts a year into the city's wastewater system, according to their permit.

While bottled water sells itself as better than tap water, it contributes to pollution and has been found in some cases to be less healthy than tap water.

Many of the bottles end up in landfills and in some cases contain industrial chemicals and bacteria above state and industry standards.

According to the Sierra Club, nine out of 10 plastic water bottles end up as garbage or litter.