For evidence of bottled water's sudden need for an image makeover, look no further than Aberfoyle. Last year, 6,000 residents of Ontario's Wellington County reared up and slapped the Swiss food giant Nestlé, which wanted to renew the water-taking licence of its bottling plant in Aberfoyle and to apply for a rezoning to expand an adjacent warehouse. Yet when Nestlé's licence had last come up for renewal two years earlier, only two people objected—even though Nestlé had more than tripled the amount of water it was taking.
For years, Nestlé Waters has been selling spring water drawn from an aquifer that feeds both the Grand River and the local water table. By the time the 2007 licence renewal came due, farmers and other residents were worried about the plant's effect on the local watershed. According to a hydrologist hired by the activist group Wellington Water Watchers, the facility was using 7% of the local water, and was beginning to deplete a creek.
Beyond the ecological issue, residents wondered why Nestlé was allowed to source its primary ingredient at virtually no cost. They pointed out that if the average citizen drew an equivalent amount of water from municipal sources, it would cost him or her $2,700 per day, whereas Nestlé will ante up not much more than that—$3,000—to tap the Aberfoyle spring for five years. (Thereafter, of course, comes commercial alchemy: A bottle of freely sourced water ends up costing more than a litre of gas.)
The push-back put Nestlé—whose Canadian water sales are about $279 million (U.S.) a year—on notice. The company invested $2.5 million to reduce the amount of waste water produced by the Aberfoyle plant. Now the expansion is proceeding. Gail Cosman, president of Nestlé Waters Canada, says the plant's process is not actually wasteful. Consider, she says, that it takes almost four litres of water to produce one litre of pop—all the excess goes toward cleaning the bottling equipment—whereas a litre of bottled spring water requires only 1.6 litres of water to produce. "We've reduced our plastic and we've reduced our cardboard, but we need to do more to help the environment," Cosman says.
The battle of Aberfoyle—and others like it—reflects the mounting public skepticism about a product that rapidly rose to extraordinary popularity and that, until recently, was seen as benign and even hip. Where a few decades ago there was nothing, Canada now has a $731-million bottled water industry, which, like the global one ($50 billion U.S. worldwide), is dominated by four firms: Nestlé, Coke, Pepsi and Danone. Beyond that quartet in Canada is a handful of smaller players, like Canadian Springs, a Danone spinoff that focuses on the water cooler market.
(Massimo Bortolamiol)
The opposition is comprised of environmentalists and anti-corporate activists such as Council of Canadians chair Maude Barlow. The water critics accuse the big bottlers of siphoning off natural resources, as at Aberfoyle. But the rap sheet also includes the various ways that bottled water turns the natural into the unnatural, adding packaging waste (about half of all sales are in single-serving bottles); greenhouse gas emissions (for instance, from shipping millions of bottles of "natural artesian" water from Fiji to the United States); and health risks. In 2004, bottles of Coke's Dasani were pulled from British supermarket shelves in response to concerns about contamination. (Perrier experienced a similar recall in 1990, prior to its acquisition by Nestlé.)
In some quarters, the cachet enjoyed by bottled water is now running in the other direction. "There's a huge backlash on campuses and in some restaurants," claims Barlow. "The 'in' thing now is not to serve bottled water."
Cosman says the anti-water campaigns "have not affected sales, yet." But the bottled water sector as a whole, which accounts for a small fraction of all commercial and industrial water use, seems vaguely confounded by its newfound status as the Hummer of the beverage industry.
