Boston Globe: Putting a cap on the bottled water industry

[marmar]

Putting a cap on the bottled water industry
By Amy Vickers
July 7, 2008


OVER A half-billion dollars of Massachusetts' taxpayer money will be spent this year on clean drinking water program loans to communities, yet Beacon Hill has been strangely silent about - and invested not one penny in defense of - small- and often low-income rural towns that stand alone against what many see as a threat to their drinking water supplies: Swiss-based Nestlé Waters.

Nestlé, the old candy company that once spawned an international boycott of its products for proffering cheap infant formula as better than mother's milk to women in developing countries, now profits from what many say is sullying another sacred solution: the bottling of pristine waters. It may soon do this in some of the state's most water-stressed and fragile communities.

For more than a year, Nestlé and its well drillers, technical consultants, and lawyers have been quietly surveying the profit potential in the few remaining unspoiled springs and aquifers in Central and Western Massachusetts. In its attempts to strike blue gold, the firm has aggressively pursued water extraction deals that have many locals seeing red.

Two recent efforts by Nestlé to pursue pumping operations in small towns illustrate why withdrawals for commercial water bottling operations in our state pose unacceptable risks, not only to local drinking water supplies, but also to such natural assets as fisheries and conservation land. Last summer, Montague residents halted - at least for now -Nestlé's pursuit of the spring water beneath Montague Plains, a state wildlife management area that also recharges critical ground water for a state fish hatchery and the local wells on which many homes and farms depend.

This spring, after considerable public outcry, Clinton town officials appeared to have finally rejected Nestlé's bid to extract and export up to a quarter-million gallons of spring water a day - equal to 4 million servings of some of the cleanest drinking water in the state - from the nearly 600-acre Wekepeke Reservation land that Clinton owns in the town of Sterling. The offer posed several legal issues, not least the fact that Clinton's 19th-century water rights to the Wekepeke are for surface water - not spring water - and only for town public water supply needs. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/07/putting_a_cap_on_the_bottled_water_industry/

[Warpy]

1. Trophy water is about to go the way of Pet Rocks and Mood Rings

and for much the same reason. It was always the stuff of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous consumption is going out of style fast as people take to boasting about how little they paid for necessities instead of how much they paid for luxuries.

Nestle is going to take a hit on this project. They're about 10 years too late to cash in on the fad.

[papapi]

3. Nestlé owns Perrier Bottled Water. I'd say they cashed in long ago.

Nestlé took over Perrier in 1992 and formed what would eventually be called Nestlé Waters SA

[freesqueeze]

2. Never "got" the bottled water fad

And why not capture some of that fresh mountain air and sell it to those with too much money?

[mikeytherat]

4. That would be "Perri-Air - sparkling, salt-free air"

Courtesy of Spaceballs.


mikey_the_rat