Is it just a coincidence that one of the most successful and pricey bottled spring water brands, Evian, is just naïve spelled backward?
According to a slew of activists around the nation who feel that natural water resources shouldn’t have a price tag the answer would be no. They are pitted in a battle against bottled water companies that wish to quietly siphon it away from many fresh water basins around the United States. A number of bottled water boycott movements have been orchestrated by concerned citizens who feel the pumping of what they consider to be a luxury item from the springs could result in ecological damage, due to unnatural water temperature variations and the potential for contamination.
The now inactive, but still accessible, Save Our Springs Inc. (http://www.saveourspringsinc.org) was an outlet for activists opposed to Nestlé pumping their Zephyrhills bottled water from Crystal Springs, located about 20 miles south of Hillsborough County. Homemaker Terri Wolfe headed the group and received much publicity during a decade-long fight with Harvey Goodman, the private owner of the once-public springs who is responsible for the deal with Nestlé. Wolfe has always been skittish with reporters and, subsequently, now holds a certain level of distrust toward the media because of what she perceives as a belittling of her struggles. Wolfe was unavailable for comment about the status of Save Our Springs.
Although Florida’s anti-bottled water movement has slowed to a trickle, the same companies that have successfully acquired springs in the Sunshine State weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms elsewhere. Wisconsin and other states containing portions of the Great Lakes are home to fierce resistance against Nestlé and the Perrier product the company hoped to pump from the state’s water supply.
“They don’t have smokestacks belching sulfate gas, that’s true,” says Dan Holland, one of the founding members of Wisconsin’s “No Way Perrier” movement. “They do, however, create a major infrastructure close to their facility. Pavement causes water to run off it when it gets warm, and it could run into the trout stream.”
Holland, an employee search consultant for electronic engineering businesses, an avid fisherman and a part-time poet, coined the phrase taken as the moniker for the groundswell of Wisconsin citizens who vocally oppose packaged-food giant Nestlé’s desire to pump Perrier mineral water from the state’s fresh water lakes. The movement began when a barrage of bumper sticker boycotters in Waushara County proudly began posting “No Way Perrier” slogans on their rides to protest Nestlé’s bid on the much-loved Mecan Springs. Holland’s membership in Trout Unlimited was the impetus behind the movement that has now spread nationally.
Holland says he was overwhelmed at first, but wasn’t surprised when his fellow citizens caught on.
“I was confronted with the fact: what can one person possibly do about one of the world’s largest corporations?”
Wisconsin isn’t the only place where opposition has arisen to the “water pirates,” the term used by many activists when referring to bottled water companies. Florida, with its many fresh-water spring systems, has also been a prime target for water companies.
Proponents of the bottled water industry say that the concerns of protesters are overblown. Pete Butt, co-owner and project manager for Karst Environmental Services Inc., is hired by bottled water companies in Florida to inspect prospective sites for pumping. He says the controversy over bottled water is irrational and that there is no danger of drying up the springs or harming the ecology supported by them. His company’s clients have included spring water wholesalers in contract with companies like Dannon, the makers of Evian. He surveyed Ginnie Springs before the French-owned water company began bottling spring water from the site.
“There is no withdrawal of the water. There is no aquifer withdraw, at least in Florida. People would cuss me right to my face because I say that, but they are flat out wrong. Ginnie Springs was like having a 50-gallon drum of water, and the water plant, metaphorically, was taking half a cup of water out of that drum, and then coming back the next day that half a cup will be replaced. It’s an anecdotal amount.”
Jamie Slagoe, a staff member at Ginnie Springs, says the bottled water and tourist industries don’t bump heads at her place of business. She doesn’t believe the pumping has a negative effect on the environment or the patrons who visit the springs.
“It affects divers in no way. I don’t think it’s detrimental. We have people coming down here testing the water levels once a week. As far as my views, I don’t see any environmental hazards.”
A study conducted in 1999 on the purity of bottled water by the National Resource Defense Council, an environmental lobbyist group, is a frequent source of fodder for the boycotter’s criticisms. Out of a sampling of over 1,000 bottles of 133 different brands, testing found that over one-third contained hazardous contaminants such as E. coli, bacteria from fecal matter, synthetic chemicals and arsenic. The council’s research concluded that the source of the problems stemmed from a lack of quality control standards and the FDA’s refusal to regulate water bottled in the same state it is sold, which accounts for about 70 percent of sales nationally.
Butt disagrees with the council’s suggestion that independently regulated municipal water supplies may be safer than bottled water. He says that the quality of the final product is relative to the source and that bottled water gives consumers the convenience of purchasing a product they can trust to be the same no matter where it is bought from.
“You have these people that say, ‘Get a glass of water from the sink.’ OK, let’s stop at some crap ass gas station in the middle of nowhere and I’ll give you a paper cup. You go get a glass of water from their dirty bathroom. You want to talk about what’s bad, start going to Chinese restaurants for God’s sake.”
Butt is quick to point out, however, that many companies are allowed to mislabel tap and well-drawn water because of the spring water.
He says all the companies he has worked for are true natural spring water bottlers with strict levels of quality control.
“Spring waters are always going to be the best. You’re always going to find your spring water is going to have a better taste.
“What you have is very few spots in Florida [for spring water pumping]. We researched this for quite a long time. Within the state of Florida the viable bottled water sites are not that many. With a few exceptions, they tend to be middle to lower order, second magnitude springs.”
Butt says the anger toward the bottled water industry is just “misdirected animosity” that may have to do with the state’s handling of the permit process that allows private owners to pump from spring supplies. Many of the permits allow for up to one million gallons of water a day to be pumped from the springs – an absurd number for the size of the springs in Florida. Butt asks his clients to make reasonable requests when applying for a permit so activists have less leverage to criticize their practices.
“There’s a socialistic jealousy where people think that, ‘Oh, these water bottlers are making money.’ Well it’s not like that. They’ve got staff. They’ve got overhead. They’ve got machinery. People don’t typically buy it to wash their hands or wash their car with it. They buy it to drink, the most efficient level of consumption.”
While many cave divers oppose the bottled water industry for taking away some of their favorite underwater retreats, it is ironic that Butt must use his expertise in underwater spelunking to survey potential pump sites for his clients. And while many would argue otherwise, Butt says that the bottled water industry is an ecologically sustainable business that supplies jobs and tax revenue to Florida.
“Beyond diesel trucks, there’s almost nothing. They are not a smoke stack industry, obviously. They’re not burning the plastic or boiling the water with coal. In fact, the ponds behind the Dannon plant right now – you could probably run a biology class there with what’s living in those ponds.”