Water bottling across the U.S. by USGS Vizlab

In what Maps.com calls “an exemplary experience for public communication,” this interactive website developed by the USGS Vizlab highlights the location of beverage-bottling facilities in the United States.

There are many types of beverage-bottling facilities: bottled water facilities, breweries, distilleries, ice facilities, soft drink manufacturing plants, and wineries. What do all these facilities have in common? They all use water.
Although there are estimates for bottled water consumption, national datasets about how much water is withdrawn from groundwater, surface water, and springs for bottled water and other beverages are limited. Water withdrawals for bottling are not federally regulated (unlike the quality of bottled drinking water, which is regulated). Both voluntary and mandatory reporting of water use varies from state to state, and some states cannot share withdrawal data for beverage-bottling or other categories of water use. Without these data, we cannot accurately assess bottled water influence on the water cycle locally, regionally, or nationally.

To help fill this gap, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Water Mission Area's Bottled Water Assessment project conducted an inventory of bottling facilities across the United States, with a main focus on bottled water (Buchwald and others, 2023 https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/withdrawals-bottled-water). This interactive website explores these data in great depth while providing an immersive and educational experience for the reader. The lead visualization is a paired interactive chart and map that allow the user to explore county-level data across six categories of bottling facilities. In addition, the map provides a unique experience for those using a screenreader. Screenreader users can interact with the title menu and chart to update the map and hear key takeaways for each map view—going beyond simple alt text to provide a meaningful summary of the data for all users.

Data are available from https://doi.org/10.5066/P90Z125H and the code behind the visualizations is available from https://github.com/DOI-USGS/vizlab-bottled-water.