(1) How do I answer this question? My product contains two significant aspects, the water and the bottle. The water is sourced from the Cascade Mountains in Kirkland, WA, feeding both the Cedar River Watershed and the South Fork Tolt River Watershed. Kirkland Signature Water usually comes from the Tolt River Watershed. ("2022 Annual Water Quality Report," 2022)Since a private company bottles this product, Niagara Bottling Company (Felton, 2019), I do not have direct sources of the bottle materials. Still, they are made of PET plastic and HDPE caps and are manufactured in-house. (Beverage Manufacturing | Niagara Bottling, n.d.)

The water arrives at the manufacturing plant by being loaded onto a water tanker and then delivered via road transportation. (Water Quality Report 2018, 2018)The bottles and caps are typically transported by road or train to the manufacturing facility. (Transportation: Delivering the Plastic Products You Cannot Live Without, n.d.)Once the water is filtered and bottled, it is transported via trucks direct-to-store.

(2) It is common knowledge that milk comes from cows, but did you know it comes from various animals, nuts, plants, and other non-dairy sources? There are twenty-two different kinds available for consumers to purchase ("What are the 22 different types of milk (Animal & plant-based)?" 2022)? I could not think of an answer to this question. For this class, however, I intended to explore the supply chain process for just cow milk, which starts at dairy farms where the cows are milked from their udders to retrieve the milk. The product is then transported to refrigerated tanks for storage via a pipeline, and it remains there for less than two days when it is picked up by tanker trucks and taken to a processing plant. The product undergoes repeated testing at the processor to ensure its safety and without bacteria, and it gets "homogenized, pasteurized, packaged, and shipped" out to stores on temperature-controlled trucks (Kroll, 2016). As a truck driver, I have direct experience transporting milk through the supply chain. I have picked up loads of milk many times from the processor and brought it back to the warehouse, where it is unloaded and reloaded onto another trailer for store deliveries. With the short shelf life of milk, transport time from one location to another must be quick and efficient as there is always a high demand for it.