Nestle's bid to bottle public water raises much ire

Cascade Locks - its water has
been at the heart of much debate

It’s easy to hate Nestle’s bottled water business.

The multinational behemoth recently fought a case at the Maine Supreme Court to continue filling Poland Spring bottles — at the same rate the locals pay for tap water. Environmental groups and locals had challenged whether the water company had the authority to sign a 25-year, 603,000 gallon/day contract for public water. The groups lost.

Then the company announced it would build a bottled water facility in Phoenix, of all places, which prompted local outcry and a change.org petition to get Nestle out of the desert city, which pipes nearly all its water from the Colorado River. Ironically, Lake Mead, one of the Colorado’s largest reservoirs serving Phoenix, recently hit its lowest point ever, another marker in the Western United States’ multi-year drought.

It’s this same drought that catalyzed people in Cascade Locks, Oregon to kick Nestle out. After nearly a decade of fighting, under three different gubernatorial administrations, Nestle officially is not allowed to pipe water from the Columbia River Gorge or build a bottling plant in Cascade Locks, after residents successfully initiated a ballot measure prohibiting the sale or transport of water for bottling purposes.

“Nestle can out-lawyer you every time. They have more money than god,” Julia DeGraw, a senior campaigner with Food and Water Watch, told ThinkProgress. “When you take the time to educate voters, there isn’t an amount of money that Nestle can spend to convince them that water isn’t important.” Cascade Locks’ ballot initiative is likely the first time that a municipality has enacted legislation to stop the bottled water phenomenon literally at the source.

Read the ClimateProgress story - “The Battle Over Public Drinking Water Has Just Begun.”