Ontario groups wage water war on Nestle

[NESTLE/Philippe Gontier]

Water activists want the Ontario government to turn off the taps on Nestle Canada and other large-scale “water miners” — the latest scuffle in an ongoing water war erupting throughout North America.

Nestle operates two water bottling plants in the province. The permit for one, near Aberfoyle, is set to expire soon. The permit for the other is up for renewal next year.

The company, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, has applied for a third permit in Pilkington.

“This unsustainable theft from our aquifer must end,” says an online petition that has garnered more than 13,000 supporters.

Libby Carlaw, spokeswoman for Save Our Water, says area residents have recently been asked to reduce water usage by 10 per cent due to dry conditions.

“That’s not onerous… but we don’t know what the future holds for these resources,” she tells Yahoo Canada News.

Though there are 15 current permits for bottling water in Ontario and many more in British Columbia – where the company has also come under fire – Nestle has become the go-to target for industry critics.

In Ontario, water bottlers are charged $3.71 per million litres by the province. In B.C., the province just began last year charging $2.25 per million litres.

Earlier this year, Nestle was denounced for bottling 136 million litres of water from California’s San Bernardino forest as the state struggles under an historic drought.

In May, voters in Hood County, Ore., voted overwhelmingly in favour of a ballot initiative to ban large-scale water bottling, though the city council of Cascade Locks instructed staff to find a way forward for a deal with Nestle to draw 380 million litres a year from the nearby Oxbow Springs.

Bottled water is a US$100 billion a year business globally but it has come under fire not just for the use of the resource or the low fees, but for the plastic pollution it produces.

Carlaw says 1.6 million litres a day for bottles means 3.2 million 500-millilitre bottles a day.

“That’s a lot of plastic,” she says. “Our main concern is the water but a big part of it is that’s a huge amount of plastic to be bringing into the world and the ecosystem and plastic ends up in all sorts of places we don’t want it.”

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre recently mused that the city will have to look at banning bottled water.

“We need to have that debate on plastic,” Coderre told reporters after the city moved to ban plastic bags.

There are active campaigns to ban plastic water bottles in at least 20 Canadian university campuses and schools.

Dozens of communities in Canada have moved to restrict or discourage sales of bottled water, though the Canadian Bottled Water Association says provinces report recycling rates between 40 and 80 per cent.

Since 2012, Toronto has banned the sale and distribution of bottled water in all civic centres, city facilities and parks, with some exceptions.

The City of Vancouver has done the same but the Vancouver park board voted down a similar ban last year, citing the revenues from sales.

Ontario’s environmental commissioner sounded an alarm of sorts in her most recent annual report.

“While Ontario’s freshwater resources may seem plentiful, there are limits to the amount of water that can be taken sustainably. Population growth, development pressures and the predicted effects of climate change (such as lower water levels and drier soils) make proper management and conservation of our water resources increasingly important,” the report says.

The report said fees charged by the province to industrial and commercial water users cover just 1.2 per cent of the $16-million cost of water quality management.

Environment Minister Glen Murray said last fall that a new fee schedule was in the works.

Permit renewals are “absolutely not automatic,” ministry spokesman Gary Wheeler tells Yahoo Canada News.

Bottled water represents approximately 0.002 per cent of the total annual amount of ministry permits for 2015, Wheeler says. Permits are only required for amounts greater than 50,000 litres per day.

And Ontario has a groundwater monitoring network to collect data from key aquifers, he says.

But Carlaw says the data is not good enough and Ontario’s outdated regulations did not anticipate the rise of single-use bottles of water.

“This isn’t specific to Nestle.

“We don’t want that kind of permit granted to anyone, really, because once that water leaves our watershed, it’s gone.”