Please boycott bottled water—most of it comes from California

Please boycott bottled water—most of it comes from California: Calistoga, Crystal Geyser, Arrowhead, Aquafin, Dasani, etc. Every drop counts. And for every litre, it takes an additional 1.65 litres just to bottle it. Besides, Niagra, Paradise, Aquafina and Dasani are just plain TAP WATER!!! Really, really.

Nestle's and Coca-Cola drill wells and steal take our free unregulated groundwater from towns and to sell it back in designer bottles. Nestle had plans to drain the town of McCloud's water supply—they fought and won. Now it's moved to Sacramento (unregulated water). 

Nestle sells 70 different brand names including Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Perrier and Poland Spring. The average American consumes 30 + gallons (200 bottles) of water a year. Bottled water (5.2 billion gallons last year), is an inefficient use of water with excess packaging. Consumers are paying a thousand times mark-up for tapwater.

And if you're still not convinced, this is Lake Shasta—tiny white dot is two houseboats sans marina which is up the hill, high and dry. Mt. Lassen (in the distance) and Shasta have NO SNOW AT ALL! Most of our reservoirs depend upon snowmelt. Not this year. Next snow season is November, if we're lucky. Could be as late as January or February, and then, very little.

Montague is just about put of water—no snow on Stasta. No sowmelt coming into Lake Shastina which holds 30,000 acre-feet of water. This year, the lake started well below 10,000 acre feet, and it's dropping... More than 80% of California is now in a state of extreme exceptional drought. These top ten cities are almost out of water: Bakersfield, Fresno, Visalia, Madera, Merced, Santa Cruz, Santa Maria, Gilroy–Morgan Hill, Salinas, Hanford. And that's not counting all the little towns lie Weed, Montague, Healdsburg, etc.

Nevada too is suffering—Lake Mead is at a historic low. That's a three-story ferryboat. The old shoreline (white) is way more than 30 feet above the current lake level. This historic low water level was taken in April. Lake Mead's in much worse shape now.

What is "lawn"? In California, it should be an alien concept. We're saving every drop of greywater (especially dishes and showers) to water our plants. I try & save the cleaner water for the vegetables. Two dishpans and a sawed off gallon milk container as a catchall and scoop. Actually I do have a postage-stamp sized lawn—part of Candlestick Park. I save my greywater to keep it alive.

The drought that is devastating California and much of the West has dried the region so much that 240 gigatons worth of surface and groundwater have been lost, roughly the equivalent to a 3.9-inch layer of water over the entire West, or the annual loss of mass from the Greenland Ice Sheet, according to the study. 

So, I reiterate, don't buy bottled water. You're part of the problem.