Rebuttal to Nestlé Waters North America Statement on “FLOW: For the Love of Water”

We have been promoting “FLOW” and speaking on panel discussions during screenings of the movie. Nestlé is right to say that everyone deserves access to safe, reliable and affordable drinking water. Universal access to water is a human right. No one who is thirsty should be forced to pay for a drink of water. But Nestlé is not in the business of providing social services.

On the contrary, Nestlé is in the business of earning profits and increasing shareholder value. The company does that by bottling as much water as possible and selling it for as much money as possible. Neither of those endeavors helps further the goal of making water a human right.

Fact: Bottled water is not necessary to promote public health.

Hydration was never a problem before the bottled water industry started its marketing campaign during the latter part of the 20th century. In most households across the United States, people have universal access to clean, pure drinking water. It is as clean as or cleaner than bottled water. In fact, as much as 40 percent of bottled water is nothing more than purified tap water.

Multiple solutions exist for ensuring that people are hydrated. Before bottled water was promoted and marketed, people depended on water fountains and refillable bottles for hydration. Today, we have an excellent selection of reusable bottles to choose from that do not have BPA or other chemicals that could leech into the water. We also need a national movement to advocate for the installation and repair of drinking water fountains and reusable bottle filling stations.

Fact: Bottled water currently plays an important role in disaster relief, but that wasn’t always the case.

We do not contest the fact that natural disasters and other emergencies sometimes render municipal water delivery impossible, which makes bottled water an important alternative. However, the amount of bottled water necessary for emergencies is small and does not need to be provided by Nestlé or any of the other bottled water companies. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency could stockpile bottled water regionally for emergencies. This water could be provided by municipal utilities in different areas of the country.

In the days before bottled water became more widely available, during the mid-1970s and before it took off in the 1990s (thanks to the cleverly marketed myth of bottled water purity and to the wider availability of lightweight PET plastic containers), the U.S. government filled stainless steel tanks with water and trucked them to disaster
sites. FEMA could return to that practice.

Fact: Bottled water is different than tap water.

Nestlé is correct in saying that water from U.S. public water systems is clean and safe to drink. While public water systems can have spikes in pathogens such as cryptosporidium and pharmaceuticals, so can bottled water. Nestlé speaks of the purity of bottled water, but fails to mention that the Environmental Protection Agency standards for tap water are much more stringent than the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of bottled water. And even if the FDA wanted to regulate bottled water more stringently, its hands are tied. The agency oversees only interstate sales of bottled water, which are less than half – 30 percent to 40 percent – of all bottled water produced in the United States.

Tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled water. The EPA requires it to be tested hundreds of times a month. And municipal water systems are required by law to make their testing results available to the public. The EPA also mandates that surface sources of tap water be tested for cryptosporidium and if found, the water must be disinfected. More than 90 percent of communities met EPA standards this year. For citizens in communities that don’t meet standards, installing a filter at home is the best option. On the other hand, the FDA has less than one full-time staff person overseeing the bottled water industry. The agency requires only four empty bottles to be tested for bacteria once every three months and a sample of water to be tested after filtration and before bottling once a week. Bottled water is never tested after bottling and storage and it is never tested for the chemicals that can leech from the plastic bottle into the water.

As far as taste goes, in its 2001 study on bottled water, the World Wildlife Fund highlighted a Good Morning America taste test in which the studio audience heavily preferred New York City tap water to Poland Spring and Evian bottled water. That was just one of the many taste test results that come as a surprise. Why? Because the bottled water industry has successfully promoted the myth that its products are purer than tap water. However, they are not. Even spring water doesn’t necessarily come from a pretty mountain setting. It often originates from wells underneath industrial facilities, which of course can lead to contamination.

Fact: The damage done by bottled water mining depends on the watershed.

While it is true that the bottled water industry accounts for a small percentage of total fresh water withdrawals worldwide, that is not the issue. Location is key. When the flow and level of a region‚ springs, wetlands, lakes, streams and rivers are materially affected by water extraction for bottling, the entire local environment can suffer. While businesses and people across the country have to rely on their community’s water management plans, Nestlé often seems to end up with sweet deals for water extraction.

For example, in a now defunct contract in McCloud, California, Nestlé would have paid the community only one penny for every 17 gallons of water it took.

While agriculture is a larger water user than bottled water, much of it is recycled and reused within the watershed. More importantly, the wateris being used to grow food for people to eat. In contrast, Nestlé is extracting water to sell across the country for more than the cost of gasoline. Meanwhile, tap water that is as pure as or purer than bottled water costs a fraction of bottled water. Not to be forgotten is the fact that producing a 20-ounce bottle of water can require as much as 60 ounces of water. That is not exactly a sterling example of efficiency.

Fact: Bottled water privatizes a natural resource.

Water is a natural resource that the bottled water industry mines from an aquifer or takes from a municipal source and sells it to make a profit. Nestlé and other companies don’t give away water.

Fact: Nestlé has run controversial water extraction operations far beyond Michigan.

While it is one thing for Nestlé to say that the fight in Mecosta County, Michigan against Nestlé operations is “an exception and not the rule”; the reality is different. Communities across the country are fighting the corporate behemoth.

In McCloud, California, for example, citizens raised fierce opposition to the company’s plan to extract more than 500 million gallons of water a year. In response, Nestlé wanted to renegotiate its contract. Under the original deal, the local water district bore all responsibility for the well-being of the springs and water infrastructure.

Other communities fighting Nestlé include Barnstead, New Hampshire; Rangeley and Fryeburg in Maine; and Pasco County, Florida.

Fact: The bottled water industry is not a good job source and when it does bring jobs, they don’t pay much.

Overall, bottled water facilities employ few people. In 2006, 628 water-bottling plants across the nation employed fewer than 15,000 people. Each plant averaged only around 24 employees. As studies have shown, when a new bottling plant comes to a town, the couple dozen jobs it does bring benefit mostly people from outside the community, not the residents who gave up control over their water for the promise of jobs.

In the long-term, one study reports that a town’s residents occupy only 10 to 40 percent of all new jobs created by overall employment growth. A typical bottled water plant with 24 workers will employ between two and ten local residents. This is a far cry from what towns expect when they sign control of their water away to corporate interests. Local residents who do secure jobs at bottled water plants likely will earn low wages. A bottled water plant employee’s annual earnings fall more than a thousand dollars short of what the average U.S. worker makes.

Compared to a typical manufacturing job, bottled water workers are losing out to the tune of $10,000 each year. Setting the bar low is no way to lift up a cash-strapped community. If anything, it could further depress wages and scare away businesses that rely on households’ surplus income, two losses that cut into a local government’s tax base and drive down the local economy.

Conclusion: No need for bottled water. We can do better. We can take back the tap.

While the United States arguably has the best municipal drinking water system in the world, improvements are always possible. That is why Food & Water Watch favors better enforcement of the Clean Water Act and other federal and state laws and regulations meant to protect our source water from pollution. We also strongly urge Congress to pass a federal trust fund to provide billions of dollars over the coming decades to repair, rejuvenate and refine our drinking water and wastewater systems.

Learn more about these issues in our report, Take Back the Tap.