Tap Water Worries Have You Buying Bottled? Safeway Loves You!

by Jonah Owen-Lamb. Published June 2 by the Merced (California) Sun-Star, and posted on Commondreams.org
 
Wells are drying up across the county from an overtaxed and sinking water table.

Drought and climate change threaten the future of local water supplies.

And Merced has been selling its tap water since 2002 to a water bottling plant, which then sells that water at rates far above what it costs the plant to buy it from the city.

The Safeway Inc.'s water bottling plant in Merced -- one of the top five commercial/industrial water users in the city, which bottles Safeway's in-house purified and spring water brand Refreshe -- uses roughly 50,000 gallons a day, five days a week, for its bottling operation.

The plant, which provides most Refreshe drinking and spring water to Safeway stores in the state, filters city water, puts it in bottles and sells it as purified water. The bottles note that the water was bottled in Merced, but not that it was pumped out of the ground by the city. (Refreshe spring water is shipped in from a spring and then bottled in Merced.)

Some say the operation is just like any other business that buys water from the city. But others claim it represents a troubling trend. Environmentalists and water rights activists contend that the increasing commercialization of public water and the selling of tap water not labeled as such isn't how water pumped out of the ground by cities is meant to be used. They claim that bottled water sells itself as safer and healthier than tap water, but in many cases is not.

The Sierra Club's Water Privatization Task Force noted that the growth of the bottled water industry -- spearheaded by companies like Nestle, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola -- is not only depleting aquifers and springs across the country, but also represents a step toward increasing water privatization.

The task force also noted that the industry advertises bottled water as better than tap water -- even though much of the water in bottles comes from the tap. "The bottled water industry promotes bottled water as a healthy, trendy drink, without mentioning that it can cost 500 to 4,000 times more than tap water," commented the task force.

In Safeway's case they pay more than $1,000 a month for more than a million gallons of water. The retail cost for that much purified bottled water at Safeway is just under $3 million. Safeway would not say how much it costs them to produce their water.

Despite these concerns, the public's taste for the stuff is growing.

According to a 2009 report on the industry by Bottled Water Reporter, bottled water sales in the U.S. accounted for more than $11 billion in 2008. Over the last decade bottled water consumption jumped from more than $4 billion in 2000 to double that by 2008. According to Food & Water Watch, over 112 bottling plants exist in the state and over 1 billion gallons of bottled water are sold in California every year.

In the report, tap water was distinguished from bottled water. "Clearly," noted the report, "consumer perceptions matter, and consumers regard bottled water very differently from tap water. Even where tap water may be safely potable, many people prefer bottled water, which they regard as superior in taste."

Safeway spokeswoman Teena Massingill said that criticisms about commercializing municipal water and replacing it with expensive bottled water are baseless and unfounded. "There will always be critics of products," she said. "We are providing a product that did not exist previously. So I think that the argument that they are making is unfounded," she said.

As for the Safeway's operation in Merced, Merced spokesman Mike Conway said the city treats Safeway as it would any other industrial water consumer.

"There's no difference between any kind of water user who uses our water to process a product -- whether it's bottled water or anything else," said Conway.

"As for some additional perspective," wrote Conway in an e-mail, "if the city pumps about 21 million gallons of water a day, and Safeway uses 50,000, that works out to be 0.238 percent of our total gallons pumped."

But the plant doesn't only use water. It also produces waste. The plant's purification process discharges roughly 52,000 pounds of salts a year into the city's wastewater system, according to their permit.

Safeway's in-house brand Refreshe, bottled in Merced with well water, doesn't say on its label that it was originally municipal tap water.

Massingill's reply is simply that the product that Safeway provides -- fresh water -- isn't tap water.

But a new law could force water bottlers to at least let consumers know the source of their bottled water -- not just where it was bottled.

Assembly Bill 301 would require bottling facilities to register with the state and disclose the source of their water. Currently, the state's Department of Public Health only requires that bottled water labels list where the water was bottled, not the actual source of that water.

Another area of concern with bottled water, says Ruth Caplan, the national coordinator for the Defending Water for Life campaign, is that while bottled water sells itself as better than tap water, it contributes to pollution and has been found to be less healthy than tap water -- at least in some cases.

Many of the bottles end up in landfills, Caplan added, and in some cases contain industrial chemicals and bacteria above state and industry standards. According to the Sierra Club, nine out of 10 plastic water bottles end up as garbage or litter.

The National Resources Defense Council tested a wide array of bottled waters in the late '90s and found the majority contained either industrial chemicals and other contaminants, such as chloroform, that were above levels set by the state and the industry. The study included Safeway-brand bottled waters whose labels indicated they had gone through reverse osmosis filtration like the purified water in Safeway's Merced plant.

Safeway's Massingill declined to comment on NRDC's study, but said that Safeway is fully conscious of its environmental footprint and the healthfulness of its products. The company uses as little packaging as possible in its products. For instance, its plastic bottles are among the thinnest in the industry.

In addition, Safeway uses wind and solar energy on a wide scale. "We operate in the most environmentally conscious manor possible," she said. Safeway is one of the largest retail users of renewable energy in the United States as well, she said.

On top of the company's efforts to be green, Massingill said it provides jobs for roughly 70 people at its Merced plant. It's also actively involved in the community through the sponsorship of events, among other contributions.

The Wild West was founded partly over water wars. It's clear some are still being fought, even inside the bottle.

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Vote to test corporate water rights

By Ann S. Kim, Staff Writer; published May 11 by the Portland (ME) Press-Herald

A key battle in Maine's ongoing war over water will be decided in Wells on Saturday.

Voters at a town meeting will decide whether theirs will become the latest community to ban water extraction by companies like Poland Spring.

Rather than trying to regulate water extraction, the ordinance takes a "rights-based" approach by asserting that ecosystems have rights to exist, flourish and evolve naturally in town. Wells and any of its residents would have standing to seek damages in court against any company that interfered with those rights.

Under the ordinance, corporations would have no constitutional rights within the town. The Supreme Court has found that corporations have some constitutional rights – such as a right to free speech and against government taking of property without due process – but not others, such as the right against self-incrimination.

Two other Maine towns – Shapleigh and Newfield – used such an approach to adopt similar measures this year. The neighboring towns acted after Poland Spring, a subsidiary of Nestle Waters North America, started the process to drill test wells in search of a potential new water source.

In Wells, the controversy stems from a proposed 30-year contract between Poland Spring and the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District. Under that proposal – tabled indefinitely last summer because of a public outcry – the company would have been able to draw a maximum of 432,000 gallons a day from the Branch Brook aquifer. By comparison, the district's average daily water usage is about 2.8 million gallons, and peak use is about 7 million gallons a day.

The town attorney for Wells has advised selectmen that she believes the proposed rights-based ordinance violates federal and state constitutional principles, as well as state law and the town charter. Selectmen declined by a vote of 3-2 to put the ordinance on a town ballot, but supporters of the measure gathered enough petition signatures to force a town meeting.

The town's Ordinance Review Committee, meanwhile, is working on regulations for water extraction. A draft may be presented to selectmen May 27, said Bill Gosbee, the group's chairman.

The Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund promotes the rights-based approach of the water ordinances and others dealing with issues ranging from sludge spreading to corporate agriculture to mining.

Regulatory schemes have failed to protect ecosystems and have instead helped "the corporate boys build a better permit," said Gail Darrell, the fund's community organizer in New England. A different view of nature – as something that must be able to preserve itself, rather than being plundered for profit – was needed, she said.

"If we treat nature as though it has rights, we can protect it," Darrell said. "So if a corporation understands, if it destroys nature, they have to fix it. They need to be responsible for the destruction."

Darrell questions why a corporation's goals should trump those of people when people are the source of governing power and corporations are only "creations of the state." She considers court decisions giving corporations constitutional rights "illegitimate."

"'Corporation' is not in our Constitution," she said.

While corporations are artificial legal entities, courts decide whether to treat them like people when it comes to constitutional rights, said H. Cabanne Howard, a University of Maine School of Law professor. No state or municipality has the authority to negate the rights that courts say corporations have, he said.

"You can't just pass a statute saying those decisions don't matter," he said.

Dave Owen, another Maine Law professor, said a local ordinance can't trump state law, which includes a regulatory scheme that allows the extraction of water by companies like Poland Spring, with certain limitations.

Owen, who specializes in environmental law, worked as a lawyer in California with environmental groups that tried to limit water extraction and with counties that defended groundwater management ordinances against constitutional challenges.

"The better approach, if this group is frustrated with that state scheme, would be to try to change it at the state level. Passing an inconsistent local ordinance would be only a symbolic act," Owen wrote in an e-mail message.

Leah Rachin, the attorney for Wells, says the ordinance would likely be found illegal in a challenge.

If the ordinance passes at the town meeting, she said, it could be challenged by a party that has standing, one that could point to a particular injury.

Selectmen would have the option to ask a court for a determination of the ordinance's legality, Rachin said.

Poland Spring would have no legal standing in Shapleigh or Newfield, where the company has no property or business operations, said Mark Dubois, the company's natural resource manager. More work has been done in Wells, he said, but it is too early to look into whether the company would have legal standing there.

In Pennsylvania, Belfast Township in Fulton County repealed its ban on corporate farming after the state attorney general's office took action.

The office targeted the ordinance, based on others by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, because it tried to restrict activities allowed in the state constitution, said Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the office. Under a state law, the attorney general has the authority to challenge local ordinances that violate farming-related state laws.

Skip Clark of Wells, a supporter of the rights-based ordinance, worries that the water district could enter into a deal before residents fully understand the issue. In the meantime, he said, the rights-based ordinance offers protection.

"The courts decide it's not constitutional – that's no problem," he said. "It gains time for this entire issue to be thrashed out."

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People's News from 5th World Water Forum: Democratic forum demands public water for all

A statement from www.peopleswaterforum.org, March 19

International water justice activists converged at the People's Water Forum today to affirm the human right to water and present diverse visions of existing public and community-led water management practices that protect water for people and nature, and can ensure water access for all regardless of their ability to pay.

Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water to UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto, delivered a statement from him. D?Escoto was clear: "Water is a public trust, a common heritage of people and nature, and a fundamental human right. We must challenge the notion that water is a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Those who are committed to the privatization of water are denying people a human right as basic as the air we breathe."

A diverse group of water justice activists also presented their forward-looking visions. Mary Ann Manahan, of Focus on the Global South in the Philippines said "Access to water and sanitation is not only about efficiency and effective delivery but about justice, gender equity, human dignity and ultimately, democracy."

Sebahat Tuncet, a member of Turkey's Parliament, issued a strong statement against the construction of large dams, condemning especially the Ilisu and Munzur dams and others under consideration for construction throughout the region.

Adriana Marquisio, a member of Public Services International and President of Uruguay's Public Water Union, urged that water be managed publicly and not for profit. "But let us be clear," she added, "that the meaning of 'public' extends beyond state control. Public management must recognize alternative, community-led structures of governance.?

Philipp Terhorst of Transnational Institute, speaking for the European Water Network, criticized the recent EU Parliament?s resolution that fails to recognize the human right to water.

Also speaking at the conference was Al-hassan Adam, Coordinator of the Africa Water Network, who condemned the repression of activists, which, he said, reflects the larger exclusion of the majority of people from basic human rights.

These speakers represent a wide spectrum of visionary leaders offering practical, equitable, and just solutions to the world's current water crisis, said organizers of the Peoples Water Forum.

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News from the World Water Forum: 24 Hours in Police Custody

The fifth World Water Forum began this week in Istanbul. While the forum is billed as a venue for international work to avert water shortages, activists have denounced it as a front for multinationals promoting privatization of a common good for private gain. The following is a report from two activists who were arrested and deported for protesting at the forum. You can read daily updates from those critical of the World Water Forum's narrow approach and non-inclusive debate at WorldWaterForum.blogspot.com

Account of 24 hours in police custody in Istanbul from 10am on March 16,
2009 to the morning of March 17, 2009

By Ann-Kathrin Schneider, International Rivers

On March 16, 2009 at 9.30am, Payal Parekh and me unfolded a banner that read "No RISKY DAMS" just before the opening ceremony of the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. We also shouted "No Risky Dams" about five times. We were in the middle of the balcony of room 7 at the Sütlüce Conference Center in Istanbul.

The banner stayed up for about one minute -- after that, security forces took the banner. One minute later, security forces asked us to leave the room. We stayed outside of the conference room with about ten security and police officers for some minutes, while they checked our IDs, which they kept.

After that, they escorted us to a police room inside of the Sütlüce Conference Center where they wrote a statement of events, in Turkish. They asked us to sign the statement, which we refused because we didn't understand what the statement said. We asked for a translation of the statement, sentence by sentence, which we did not get.

After that, they led us to a car and drove us to a hospital. They did not take our cell phones away from us, so we were able to inform our friends about the developments. At the hospital, they led us to a doctor who asked us whether we had suffered any injuries, we said that we hadn't, she signed some papers, and we were escorted back to the car.

The police drove us to Hadic Merkezi Police Station in Beyoglu, Istanbul. There, a female policy officer did a body search on the two of us and they took our jewellery and our money, recorded everything we had, and gave it back to us.

Two lawyers, organized with the help of Turkish friends, arrived. We told them what had happened. The police finalized their statement and asked us to sign it. The lawyers translated the Turkish statement sentence by sentence. Since some details of the statement did not correspond with how we recalled the events of that morning, we refused to sign the statement and asked to give our own account of the morning's events.

Payal then reported the events of the morning to a policy officer. The lawyers helped translating her English into Turkish and the police officer wrote down the statement in Turkish. The lawyers translated the statement for us and both Payal and me signed the statement.

We then waited until about 5pm when our lawyers were called to talk to the head of the police station. The lawyers came back informing us that we had to leave the country within a couple of hours if we did not want to be put in prison for more than one year. They explained to us that our crime was that we tried to influence public opinion with the unfolding of the banner.

With the help of friends from Turkey and abroad we organized plane tickets for Payal to go back to the United States and for me to go back to Germany in the morning of Tuesday, March 17.

We were then taken to another police station and had photographs and fingerprints taken and were measured and weighed. After about one hour, we were sent back to the other police station, where we had spent the early afternoon, and spent the night there on some chairs in an office. We declined the invitation to sleep in the downstairs women's cell. A Turkish friend brought us our luggage from the hotel and we left the police station at about 6am in the morning towards the airport, in a police car.

We reached the airport at around 6.30am on Tuesday, March 17 and spent another one and a half hours at the police station at Istanbul airport, before being escorted to the check-in desk and the gate by a police officer.

The customs officer told me that I was banned from entering Turkey for two years. At the gate, the police officer gave me my boarding pass and ID.

We did not receive any documents describing what crime we were convicted of and the charges. We do not know who ordered our deportation, whether it was the police or a public prosecutor.

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Newfield, Maine, joins neighbor Shapleigh in banning large scale water extraction

Video from Portland's WCSH-6 news is available here.

NEWFIELD (NEWS CENTER) -- The town of Newfield is now the second in Maine to ban large-scale water extraction.

Saturday's vote was 228 in favor of the new ordinance and 146 against. The vote is a reaction to interest from Poland Spring Water and its parent company, Nestle, in pumping water from an aquifer shared by Newfield and Shapleigh.

Shapleigh voted for the same ban on water extraction two weeks ago. However, there is some concern that that ordinance could be overturned in court. As a result, townspeople voted on a different ordinance at town meeting Saturday that would lay out what a water company would have to do to be able to extract water from the aquifer.

That ordinance, which environmentalists felt was too weak, passed by a single vote.

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Thomas L. Friedman: The Inflection Is Near?

Published March 8 in the New York Times

Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can't resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America's addiction to Chinese exports:

FENGHUA, China - Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the "sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy. Often, when we're assigned a new order for, say, 'salad shooters,' I will say to myself, 'There's no way that anyone will ever buy these.' ... One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless [garbage]? I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I've made for them," Chen said. "And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible."

Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall - when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more."

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can't do this anymore.

"We created a way of raising standards of living that we can't possibly pass on to our children," said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks - water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land - and not by generating renewable flows.

"You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior," added Romm. "But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, 'This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...' Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy."

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year - more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit. "Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we're living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets," argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment - when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once - "The Great Disruption."

"We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder," he wrote me. "No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply." We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let's grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

Gilding says he's actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea's new national paradigm for development is called: "Low carbon, green growth." Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes - and we're seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways.

In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: "When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, 'What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?' " Often in the middle of something momentous, we can't see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker - the year when 'The Great Disruption' began.

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Maine Town Takes a Stand: Closes Tap on Water Privatization

Residents say no to Nestlé's plan to pump local water, and to their Board of Selectmen's attempt to regulate water takings

By Edward D. Murphy. Published March 1 by the Maine Sunday Telegram; reposted on CommonDreams.org

Shapleigh residents have banned companies from drawing or selling its water.

During a special town meeting Saturday morning, residents voted 114 to 66 to adopt the ban drafted by Protecting Our Water and Wildlife Resources, which had opposed Poland Spring's efforts to test, draw, bottle and market the town's water.

The ban had been opposed by the town's Board of Selectmen, which had favored instead a set of regulations on drawing water in the town that will be on the warrant for the regular town meeting on March 14.

"The problem in Shapleigh is that all three selectpeople want Nestlé (Poland Spring's parent company) in here," said Shelly Gobeille, one of the leaders of POWWR. "This vote says they can't come in."

In September, residents adopted a six-month moratorium on water testing, which was seen as a precursor to Poland Spring's plans to set up a pumping operation. The town's planning board used the time to work on rules and regulations for drawing the town's water, but POWWR wanted to ban all major water extraction operations.

When the Board of Selectmen refused to put POWWR's proposed ban on extraction on the town meeting warrant - arguing that two legal opinions said it was unconstitutional - proponents circulated a petition that led to the special town meeting.

Gobeille said POWWR is now concerned that the selectmen could seek to derail the ban, but Bill Hayes, one of the three selectmen, said he's inclined to let the ban go into force without the selectmen getting involved. However, he said, others could challenge its legality.

"The townspeople voted to enact it," Hayes said. "If they want to incur the legal expenses of defending it if it's challenged, that's up to them."

Hayes said that if Poland Spring wants to draw the town's water, it would be better to regulate the company's operations and make sure the town benefits financially. He said talks with the water bottler never got to the point where a dollar figure was discussed, but the amount the town would earn "would have been significant. This would have been an opportunity to defer" some property taxes.

Mark Dubois, natural resource manager for Poland Spring, said he was disappointed by the vote at the special town meeting.

"It's kind of disconcerting as a company with 400 jobs right now in York County," he said. "It's our home, too, and we're very discouraged we can't have a basic discussion about what we do and do well."

Dubois said the company draws water from nine sites in the state now and has sufficient supplies of water for its current needs. He said the company would have been looking to draw water from Shapleigh in 2011 or 2012, but noted that it takes a long time to gain the state and local permits that are needed.

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Wall Street Journal: How to Quench the World's Thirst

The Wall Street Journal interviews Maude Barlow, the U.N.'s new water adviser
by Alexandra Alter

Water has become a booming $500 billion industry, by some estimates. Economists and investors call it "the new oil" and "blue gold."

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, who has bought water rights for a chunk of the Ogallala aquifer in Texas and owns more water than any individual in the United States, has said the natural resource should be treated like any other commodity -- bought and sold for a profit.

In the U.S., companies such as Nestlé, which owns Poland Spring, extract hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater a year. The companies often pay little to nothing for the water that they bottle and sell.

But where some see profits, others see peril. The world is running out of fresh H20, which accounts for just 3% of the earth's water. Recent moves by multinational corporations to privatize water sources could spell disaster for poor countries and residents with no means to pay.

In Bolivia, price spikes following water privatization led to riots in 2000; eventually, Bolivia expelled Bechtel, the engineering company that the government had contracted to take over management of the municipal water supply in the city of Cochabamba. Similar clashes over privatization and price hikes have broken out in Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa and Mali.

Geopolitical experts warn that water scarcity poses not just a public health risk, but a threat to global security. Currently, some 1.1 billion people, one-sixth of the world population, lack safe drinking water. Global water consumption is growing at unsustainable rates, doubling every 20 years, according to a March 2008 report by Goldman Sachs. A study by International Alert, a London-based conflict-resolution group, listed 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion that have a "high risk" for violent conflict over water in the next two decades.

Maude Barlow, a Canadian water activist who has opposed privatization for more than 20 years, was recently appointed as the United Nation's first senior adviser on water issues. Her position, which is unpaid, was created by the Rev. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, president of the United Nations General Assembly. Here are highlights from her conversation with the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: You've been an outspoken critic of the U.N.'s and the World Bank's water policies, saying that both have aided the "corporate takeover of the world's water." Were you surprised to be offered an advisory role at the U.N.?

Maude Barlow: I don't think I would have been offered a role there by anyone but someone like Father Miguel. He cares deeply about the poor. He's a liberation theology priest from Nicaragua.

I've been critical and will continue to be critical of the overly close relationship of the U.N. to big water corporations. At a time when the need was growing so much, they said, 'Well, the private companies will pay for it,' and they didn't. No one has the right to appropriate water for profit while other people are dying.

What will you try to change about the U.N.'s water policies?

I would like to see it shift from reliance on water companies and privatization, what I call the hard path, to the soft path -- watershed protection, rain harvesting and watershed restoration. You can't have the human right to water if there's no water. Studies show that as we remove water from aquifers, we dry up the land. The rain won't come if there's no vegetation.

Some economists argue that privatization will reduce water consumption and waste, the way oil prices have spurred efforts toward more efficient energy use. Wouldn't putting a price on water actually help to reduce waste?

To me, the issue isn't whether you price or not, it's the conditions. There are three important conditions to putting a price on water. The first is that no one should be denied access because they can't pay. The second is that water is maintained by the public sector, so it's like a tax, not a fee. The third is, you're paying for the service, you don't own the water. It's very important that we say water is not a commodity.

Do you see any role for the private sector?

In the building of infrastructure and pipes. There's an important place for the private sector in water cleanup technology. There's no place for the private sector in water delivery. It should be delivered by the public sector on a not-for-profit basis.

The U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty include the objective of cutting the number of people without access to clean water in half by 2015. You have said that at the rate they're going, it will take much longer. What steps will you recommend to speed things up?

The twin pillars of a water secure future for the world are on the one hand, conservation and protection, and on the other hand, the human right to water.

One of my criticisms of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals about water has been the disconnect between those who are working on the environmental side and those who are working on the human-rights side. I don't think there's been nearly enough attention paid to protecting source water. Seventy-five to 80% of surface water in India, China or Russia is too polluted to bathe in, drink or fish in.

The U.N. bought into the World Bank's solution, which is, bring in water companies and let them provide these huge projects, and if you're wealthy you can pay for water. They don't see it as their responsibility to provide water for the poor. I've been in communities with prepaid water meters. There's water, but they can't afford to turn the tap on, so they go to the river, where there are cholera warning signs.

In your latest book, "Blue Covenant," you write about virtual water -- the water that is used to produce commodities like cars and computer chips -- as a big source of water consumption.

I think we're going to hear a lot more about that in the next few years. The U.S. is exporting a third of its water in the form of virtual water exports through commodities. Britain and Japan import most of their virtual water.

Europe grows its roses in Africa around Lake Naivasha in Kenya. The lake is so damaged now that these companies are looking for new lakes in Uganda. It's not just looking at our water footprint in our own country and community and household. It's where your water footprint is coming from.

Has the financial crisis slowed the pace of global investments in water indexes?

What worries me is the opposite. It's the one area where people are still going to invest. It's not going to fluctuate the way other commodities do, because we're a species running out of clean water.

The other thing I'm worried about from the credit crisis is that cash-strapped municipalities and states may sell off water treatment plants to the private sector.

You've criticized the Bush administration for "gutting the Clean Water Act." and have noted that funding for water research in the U.S. has been stagnant for 30 years. Do you expect to see changes under an Obama administration?

I'm sure hoping. I think this is a much more environmentally conscious president coming in, as the issues around food, water and energy are becoming more prominent. I do think that we may have an opportunity with a more open administration and a more aware public to really start to move these issues forward. But if it doesn't happen, the U.S. is going to be one big Atlanta .

Which countries would you hold up as models in terms of sustainable water management?

None. Europe is way ahead in terms of how it cares for its water. However, Europe imports the bulk of its water footprint, so the way it protects its own water is to use and abuse other countries' water.

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Maude Barlow on the global water crisis

Recently named to the new post of senior adviser to the United Nations on water issues, Maude Barlow discusses the water crisis with Canadian journalist Erin Anderssen. First posted October 25 at the Toronto Globe and Mail

"What does it take to frighten people?" Maude Barlow wonders.

She rattles off a grim list of worries, barely pausing for breath: water supplies in Africa guarded by dogs and chain-link fences while families go thirsty, the vital Murray-Darling Basin in southeast Australia crumbling into desert, the mighty Colorado River in the United States drying up to a trickle.

"The water crisis is deepening everywhere," sighs the 61-year-old activist and head of the Council of Canadians, who has tasted tear gas and faced down stun guns in defense of universal access to clean water. What scares her most is that the problem will not get fixed for her grandchildren.

This week, Ms. Barlow was named senior adviser to the United Nations on water issues - a new position created by General Assembly president Miguel d'Escoto, who raised the subject of water as a human right in his first UN speech in September. Ms. Barlow, who has been meeting with Mr. d'Escoto unofficially since August, agreed to take the position without pay.

"With my heart and soul, I believe it is the single most important environmental and human-rights threat of our time, and it's the one hitting now," she says on the telephone from Winnipeg, where she was attending a conference. "There is nothing 'in the future' about this [issue]."

Raised in Digby, N.S., where her father was the town's first social worker, Ms. Barlow has become a prominent opponent of the privatization of water - a June article in the Australian newspaper The Age said she was "to H2O what Al Gore is to CO2" - but she first made her name in Canada as an outspoken activist fighting the North American free trade agreement. She received more than her share of criticism, and her more dire predictions have not come true, but on that subject she has a practised answer: "My mother used to tell me, 'Serious people make serious enemies.' "

And Ms. Barlow is nothing if not serious. She has written 15 books - her most recent, Blue Covenant, on the global water crisis, was published last year. She travels continually and not, as one colleague pointed out, on luxury junkets. While her calendar is swamped with speaking engagements, she is not one to linger at conference centres.

"She is just tireless," says Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, an organization Ms. Barlow chairs.

In India, Ms. Hauter recalls, Ms. Barlow sat for two days in a small village with mothers who were holding a silent vigil to protest against a Coca-Cola plant that was siphoning off their water to bottle it. She was tear-gassed during an anti-globalization rally at the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong in 2005.

In Johannesburg, water services have been privatized, prepaid meters have been installed by the French company Suez, and the supply cut off to those who can't afford to pay. When local townships formed a protest march, Ms. Barlow and her staff moved to the front of the line, hoping to deter the police from using stun guns. A few days later in the Orange Farm township, she confronted some visiting Suez executives, who eventually hopped back on their bus and left without taking their tour.

This is the same doggedness that Ms. Barlow now vows to bring to her new post at the United Nations, where her main focus will be developing a new convention that sees water not as "a commodity to be sold on the open market like running shoes," but as a public resource held in trust by the government and provided as a human right to its citizens.

She says issues around water cover all the areas she feels most passionately about: gender, poverty, the environment, social justice. She describes returning from a trip in which she visited Nairobi's huge Kibera slum, where people use "flying toilets" (you defecate into a plastic bag and throw it in the street), and counting up her faucets and water lines in her Ottawa home. "I could turn them all on and run them for days, and nobody would say a word. We just take it for granted."

When she began studying the politics of water, she had to unlearn much of what she had been taught about the resource - beginning with the idea that it is infinitely renewable and that Canada is overflowing with it.

"We are a planet running out of clean water," she says. "We all learned that couldn't happen back in Grade 6. But it is happening."

And she notes that many Canadians still believe that their country has 20 per cent of the world's water supply and is therefore safe from shortages. (In fact, scientists now say Canada holds closer to 7 per cent of the planet's fresh water, and much of that is too far north to be accessible.)

Consider the ready examples that belie our myth of abundance, she says: The Great Lakes are becoming increasingly polluted as their water levels fall, many aboriginal communities have limited access to drinking water and the oil-sands expansion continues to damage the ecosystem of northern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Canadians rank among the biggest per-capita users of water in the world. "We treat our water badly," Ms. Barlow sighs.

But while the battle for a UN convention declaring water access a human right, similar to freedom of assembly and speech, will probably be long, she has reason to be hopeful.

After four years of silent vigil, the women in India managed to get their case against Coca-Cola to court and its plant was closed. As quickly as bottled water became a fad in the West, it is now becoming a faux pas; for instance, cities such as London have banned its use at municipal functions and many schools in Canada have stopped stocking it.

Blue Covenent opens with a disaster scenario: a future world where the poor continue to die from dirty water, corporations have made water a luxury of the rich and climate change is ravaging the land. Asked whether she is optimistic that the world can act in time, Ms. Barlow offers the only answer, perhaps, that a woman with four grandchildren can give: "We have to have the courage to see the crisis as it is. But anyone who knows me will tell you, I was born with a smile on my face."

In deep water: Statistics on the global water crisis from Blue Covenant

1.1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water.

The World Health Organization has found that contaminated water contributes to 80 per cent of all sickness and disease worldwide. Half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease.

In China, 80 per cent of major rivers are so polluted that they no longer support aquatic life.

By 2050, based on a population growth of three billion people, humans will need an 80-per-cent increase in water supplies to feed themselves.

In 2006, 200 billion litres of bottled water were consumed globally - a 200-per-cent increase since the 1970s.

For the price of one bottle of Evian, the average North American could buy roughly 4,000 litres of tap water.

Less than 5 per cent of plastic bottles around the world are recycled.

Read more!

Lawsuits expected to follow bottled water study

by Scott Sabatini, published on Legal Newsline on Thursday, October 16. You can read the Environmental Working Group's report, which is referenced in the article below, here.

Laboratory tests of popular brands of bottled water will result in at least one California lawsuit against retail giant Wal-Mart, according to the non-profit organization that conducted the study.

The study, released on Tuesday, found 10 U.S. bottled water brands contain mixtures of 38 different pollutants, including bacteria, fertilizer, Tylenol and industrial chemicals, according to an executive summary issued by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C.

The study asserts that Wal-Mart's label brand, Sam's Choice, fails to meet California's legal limits for bottled water contaminants.

The environmental group filed a notice of intent to sue Wal-Mart on Tuesday, alleging that the mega-chain failed to warn the public of illegal concentrations of trihalomethanes, which are cancer-causing chemicals.

Abraham Arredondo, a spokesman for the attorney general's office confirmed with Legal Newsline that they had received the letter from the Environmental Working Group and were taking it under advisement. He could not comment on the attorney general's interest in the case at this point, he said.

The study found that all brands met federal health standards, even though they fell short of the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry. California's standards exceed federal standards for water purity.

The Environmental Working Group sent a letter to California Attorney General Jerry Brown notifying him of the study and its implications for California. Brown has been a vocal critic of the bottled water industry.

This summer the threat of a lawsuit from the attorney general's office blocked a plan by Nestle, the nation's largest manufacturer of bottled water, for construction of a plant that would draw millions of gallons of water from the pristine McCloud River in Northern California. Nestle has since agreed to rework its construction and plan, lower levels of production and make further environmental concessions.

In an earlier interview Brown told Legal Newsline that Americans need to rethink their allegiance to bottled water.

"We take our pristine waters and cart them off to Maine or someplace," Brown said. "It's like carrying coal to New Castle, or ice to Alaska. It represents a level of waste that, at least, ought to be acknowledged. Hopefully, consumers will find more efficient ways to hydrate."

Officials from the Environmental Working Group said the bottled water industry has convinced consumers its product is superior, contrary to these study results.

"It's buyer beware with bottle water," said Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at EWG. "The bottled water industry promotes its products as pure and healthy, but our tests show that pollutants in some popular brands match the levels found in some of the nation's most polluted big city tap water systems. Consumers can't trust that what's in the bottle is anything more than processed, pricey tap water."

More than 25 percent of all bottled water comes from the same sources as tap water, municipal water supplies. Sam's Choice of Wal-Mart comes from Las Vegas' municipal supply.

Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts.

"The industry is spending millions, millions, on these advertising campaigning to get people think that bottled water is better than tap water." Executive Director Richard Wiles said.

Though the study did not focus on the cost and environmental impact of the bottled water industry, the group's recommendations focus on a change of mindset for consumers.

The average cost per gallon of bottled water, "$3.79 per gallon, is 1,900 times the cost of public tap water. A carbon filter at the tap or in a pitcher costs a manageable $0.31 per gallon," the EWG report states. "Consumers should drink filtered tap water instead of bottled water."

The environmental impact is also a concern, according to the report. Water bottle production in the U.S. uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per every year, according to a U.S. Conference of Mayors' resolution passed in 2007, enough energy to fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Roughly one in four bottles of the 36 billion sold each year is properly recycled, according to a 2007 study.

The study's recommendations call for "full disclosure of all test results for all contaminants," in bottled water, and made readily available to the public.

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The Earth Charter: A Declaration of Interdependence

As you read this article by Robert Dodge, and the BBC article below on the economic value of ecosystems, please also check out the Alliance's Tapestry of the Commons Project. This interactive workshop can be adapted to all ages and degrees of familiarity with environmental and social justice issues. It's a great way to start the "commons conversation" where you live. Download our 2-minute audio thoughts on the commons, too.)

This article was posted at Commondreams.org on Friday, October 10

Communities around the world will come together this Saturday to celebrate this year's Earth Charter International Summit. Global climate change is the theme of this year's Earth Charter International Summit, in keeping with the United Nations designation of 2008 as the International Year of Planet Earth.

The Earth Charter - a declaration of interdependence - articulates the shared responsibility we have to one another and to the planet itself. It is an expression of hope and a call to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history.

Created by the largest global collaborative process ever associated with an international declaration, the Earth Charter was drafted over a 10-year period by thousands from 77 countries.

It was launched at The Hague Peace Palace in 2000. It was subsequently endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals worldwide. Ventura County, California is the first U.S. county to have endorsed the charter.

• The principle areas of the Earth Charter include:
• Respect and care for the community of life
• Ecological integrity
• Social and economic justice
• Democracy, nonviolence and peace
  

Summits from Tampa, Florida to Ventura, California to Ghana, Africa and Barcelona, Spain will join others in presenting and honoring individuals whose efforts best exemplify these principles and their connection.

This years partial list of speakers and honorees include:

Alexander Likhotal, President & CEO of Green Cross International and Advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, and Earth Charter Commissioner at the Tampa, FL Summit,

Dr. Gary Yohe, 2007 co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize (with Al gore) for his work with the International Panel on Climate Change, at the East Haddem, CT Summit,

James Hansen, NASA scientist and professor at Columbia University who revealed in 2007 that the White House edited climate-related press releases to make global warming seem less threatening, at the New York, NY Summit,

Majora Carter, MacArthur-winning activist for "greening the ghetto" and urban renewal, advocate for national "green jobs" agenda, and co-host of the Green on Sundance Channel at the Washington D.C. Summit,

Puri Canals, Vice-president of IUCN as well as the chairperson for the World Conservation Congress and will be speaking on Role of Women & The Environment from the ICUN conference in Barcelona.

Jackson Browne, musician and activist, for his work throughout his career on behalf of the planet, lending his support, voice and talents raising awareness to the perils of nuclear power, peace and the environment at the Ventura, CA Summit where eight other local heros will be recognized for their courage and work.

These remarkable individuals and the incredible work they do have made the connection and are making a difference. The world is indeed better for their efforts.

Each of us might ask ourselves: What will be our commitment in realizing this opportunity?

Participants at this year's summit will be encouraged to make a commitment to an ongoing action in the year ahead to reduce their environmental impact and help sustain the planet.

The Earth Charter concludes with a challenge called "The Way Forward": "Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life."

We invite you to join us in this effort.

For more information on the Earth Charter Community Summits in your community, or the Earth Charter itself, contact: www.earthcharterus.org or www.earthcharter.org.

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Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona. Originally posted Friday, October 10.
The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.

It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.

The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.

The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change. It has been discussed during many sessions here at the World Conservation Congress.

Some conservationists see it as a new way of persuading policymakers to fund nature protection rather than allowing the decline in ecosystems and species, highlighted in the release on Monday of the Red List of Threatened Species, to continue.

Capital losses
Speaking to BBC News on the fringes of the congress, study leader Pavan Sukhdev emphasised that the cost of natural decline dwarfs losses on the financial markets.

"It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year," he told BBC News. "So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."

The review that Mr Sukhdev leads, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), was initiated by Germany under its recent EU presidency, with the European Commission providing funding. The first phase concluded in May when the team released its finding that forest decline could be costing about 7% of global GDP. The second phase will expand the scope to other natural systems.

Stern message
Key to understanding his conclusions is that as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free.

So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available. Or we have to do without them; either way, there is a financial cost.

The Teeb calculations show that the cost falls disproportionately on the poor, because a greater part of their livelihood depends directly on the forest, especially in tropical regions. The greatest cost to western nations would initially come through losing a natural absorber of the most important greenhouse gas.

Just as the Stern Review brought the economics of climate change into the political arena and helped politicians see the consequences of their policy choices, many in the conservation community believe the Teeb review will lay open the economic consequences of halting or not halting the slide in biodiversity.

"The numbers in the Stern Review enabled politicians to wake up to reality," said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an organisation concerned with directing financial resources into forest preservation. "Teeb will do the same for the value of nature, and show the risks we run by not valuing it adequately."

A number of nations, businesses and global organisations are beginning to direct funds into forest conservation, and there are signs of a trade in natural ecosystems developing, analogous to the carbon trade, although it is clearly very early days. Some have ethical concerns over the valuing of nature purely in terms of the services it provides humanity; but the counter-argument is that decades of trying to halt biodiversity decline by arguing for the intrinsic worth of nature have not worked, so something different must be tried.

Whether Mr Sukhdev's arguments will find political traction in an era of financial constraint is an open question, even though many of the governments that would presumably be called on to fund forest protection are the ones directly or indirectly paying for the review. But, he said, governments and businesses are getting the point.

"Times have changed. Almost three years ago, even two years ago, their eyes would glaze over. Today, when I say this, they listen. In fact I get questions asked - so how do you calculate this, how can we monetize it, what can we do about it, why don't you speak with so and so politician or such and such business."

The aim is to complete the Teeb review by the middle of 2010, the date by which governments are committed under the Convention of Biological Diversity to have begun slowing the rate of biodiversity loss.

Read more!

Ecuador voters approve rights of nature

On September 28, Ecuadorian voters approved a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable ecosystem rights, or Rights of Nature.

The Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly developed the new constitutional provisions with the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which is pioneering similar work in the US by helping more than a dozen local municipalities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia with drafting and adopting similar laws.

"Ecuador is now the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights," stated Thomas Linzey, CELDF's Executive Director.

Article 1 of the new "Rights for Nature" chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads: "Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies."

The Ecuadoran declaration is a departure from settled U.S. law, in that all of the major environmental laws in the U.S. - including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar state laws - treat nature as property, with no rights in and of itself. These laws legalize environmental harms by regulating how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur. Rather than preventing pollution and environmental destruction, these laws instead codify it.

The Rights of Natures laws developed by the Legal Defense Fund for local municipalities in the U.S. represent changes to the status of property law, eliminating the authority of a property owner to interfere with the functioning of ecosystems that exist and depend upon that property for their existence and flourishing. These local laws allow certain types of development that do not interfere with the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.

These local laws - and now Ecuador's constitution - recognize that ecosystems possess the inalienable and fundamental right to exist and flourish, and that people possess the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of ecosystems. In addition, these laws require the governments to remedy violations of those ecosystem rights.

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Is the Water Privatization Trend Ending?

By Julio Godoy, IPS News. Posted June 30, 2008. Posted on Alternet.

Paris is the latest city to take action to put water back into public hands, and they may be part of a new trend.

PARIS -- The announcement by the Paris municipality that water services will return to public hands by 2010 is in line with a global trend of ending privatisation of such services.

Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced June 2 that the municipal administration would regain control of all water services for the city, ending a private monopoly that has lasted more than 100 years.

The contracts with the world's two biggest water service companies, Suez and Veolia, will not be extended after Dec. 31, 2009.

"We want to offer a better service, at a better price," Delanoë said. "We also promise that prices would be stable."

Delanoë said his administration will encourage other municipalities in the Ile de France region around Paris to end privatisation of water services.

"That France, once known as the heartland of water privatisation, is embracing a return to public management of water services, is a strong signal in this new pattern," Olivier Hoedeman of the Water Remunicipalisation Tracker told IPS. The group, a sub-division of the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and the Transnational Institute, documents the decline of water privatisation.

The list of 're-municipalisation' of water services is long, and includes countries as diverse as Mali in West Africa, Uruguay where water has been brought back into the hands of the state at a national level, Buenos Aires and Santa Fe in Argentina, Cochabamba in Bolivia and Hamilton in Canada, besides other cities in France.

More than 40 French municipalities and urban communities have taken water services back into public hands over the last ten years, and brought improved services, cheaper.

In the 1990s many countries privatised their water and sanitation services, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, under strong pressure from neo-liberal governments, particularly in the European Union (EU), and from international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to 'open up' national services.

The biggest beneficiaries were Suez and Veolia, formerly known as the Compagnie Lyonnaise des Eaux and Compagnie Générale des Eaux respectively, which have been controlling water services in France since the late 19th century.

These two companies ventured into practically all privatisation of water services, from Argentina, Bolivia and Colombia in South America to numerous countries in Eastern Europe, and in the Philippines.

In Eastern Europe, Suez and Veolia won several privatisation contracts with the help of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a state-owned institution created in 1990 following a proposal by former French president Francois Mitterrand, and headed since then by a French bureaucrat.

The EU was also instrumental in trying to impose the worldwide privatisation of water and other public services through the WTO.

At a November 2001 meeting of the WTO in Doha, Qatar, former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy of France inserted a clause into the final text of a resolution, to call for "the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services." This would include water services. And Lamy now heads the WTO.

The EU has worked closely with the water companies to fashion its trade policies. In a May 17, 2002 letter, the European Commission, the EU's executive, invited private water companies to inform it of "the position and interest of the European industry, their main market, obstacles if any to access new markets, as well as other questions you would consider relevant in this context."

Bernard Maris, professor of economics at the University of Paris VIII, said Suez and Veolia were behaving like "conquerors" abroad. "At the same time, they have enjoyed a century of protectionism, and their home market continues today to be closed to foreign competitors."

Many of the privatised operations in France and abroad missed targets to expand and upgrade networks, introduced high price increases, and unaffordable connection fees. "Management activities were not transparent and accountable," Hoedeman told IPS. "As a result numerous contracts were terminated, often following popular unrest."

Privatisation of water services in the French Alpine city Grenoble in 1987 was promoted by leading ministers of the government of then president Jacques Chirac. The project by Suez was marked by corruption, fraudulent accounting practices, and high prices.

In 1999, French courts sentenced former ministers and leading Suez executives to prison sentences for their involvement in the corrupt operation, and ordered the company to pay back all water charges imposed between 1990 and 1998.
Once the court cancelled the Grenoble contract and returned water services to the city municipality, prices were immediately brought down. By the end of 2002, the price of water in Grenoble, at 2.14 euros a cubic metre, was about the lowest in all French cities. Similar improvement came in cities around the world that put an end to privatisation of water services.

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Bottled Water Industry Faces Growing Opposition

Last week’s decision in York County may be part of a national backlash.

by Kevin Wack
Published on Monday, June 30, 2008 by the Portland Press Herald (Maine)
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/30/10004/

Last week’s decision by a York County water board to delay a vote on whether to sell municipal water to Nestle Corp., the owner of Poland Spring, did not happen in a vacuum.

* Last month in McCloud, Calif., after encountering opposition to what would have been the largest water bottling plant in the country, Nestle announced plans to significantly reduce the plant’s size.
* Earlier this month in Enumclaw, Wash., the city council rejected a proposal to allow Nestle to build another such plant.
* And last Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors voted to phase out use of bottled water for municipal employees.

Across the country, opposition to bottled water is building, amid growing concerns about the industry’s environmental impact and rising fears about private control of public water supplies.

“There’s no question that there is a groundswell,” said Ruth Caplan, coordinator of Defending Water for Life, a Washington, D.C.-based campaign that opposes the bottled water industry.

There are several reasons for the backlash to bottled water. Some of it is driven by fears about global warming - given the amount of oil needed to bottle and transport the water.

Some stems from concerns about the chemical makeup of plastic water bottles.

Some of the opposition is a byproduct of the huge price disparity between bottled water and the kind of water that comes from the tap for free.

Here in Maine, some of the local opposition to Poland Spring’s operations has stemmed from the traffic generated by the trucks that transport the water.

Perhaps the biggest factor, though, is a fear that as bottled water becomes more popular, private corporations are gaining more control over a natural resource that is central to life.

“The fundamental issue is, who owns the water?” said Jim Olson, an attorney for Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, which has been engaged in a legal battle with Nestle. “If this company gets to do it, all companies get to do it, and you’re not going to be able to say no in the future.”

Caplan expressed concern that the bottled water industry is turning water into a commodity, the price of which will be determined by the market.

“What they’re trying to do is get us to think that drinking water comes out of their bottles, and water to wash with comes out of the tap,” she said.

Tom Brennan, a natural resources manager for Poland Spring, said the company’s products are not in competition with tap water. And, he said, there’s enough water in the ground for both uses.

Poland Spring hopes to draw as much as 250,000 gallons per day from the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District, which uses up to 7 million gallons per day, and has recently found sources to provide an additional 3 million gallons each day.

“We’re not depleting aquifers. That would be absolutely counterproductive,” Brennan said.

He and other defenders of the industry note that soda and beer also require water, but they don’t provoke the same opposition as bottled water.

Brennan acknowledged that opposition to the industry is growing, but he put it in the context of growth in the popularity of bottled water.

“To be quite honest, I don’t pretend to understand it,” Brennan said. “I think it’s isolated, yet loud.”

Poland Spring currrently gets water from more than 20 wells in eight Maine communities, including Fryeburg, Denmark and Dallas Plantation. The company has bottling plants in Hollis and Poland Spring, and - in response to rising demand - plans to open a third plant in Kingfield.

In York County, the water district’s recent decision to delay a vote on the Poland Spring deal followed a public meeting where more than 100 people expressed their opposition.

The water district’s trustees voted to postpone their decision until after an independent scientific review of the data underlying the proposal.

Emily Posner, the state leader of Defending Water for Life, said she was heartened by the outpouring of opposition to the deal. She said that people from all over Maine came out to stand up against the corporate control of water.

Brennan, of Poland Spring, countered that many of the people protesting the deal are not from the Kennebunk area or even from Maine.

“And that in my mind is somewhat troubling,” he said.

Read more!

Op-Ed suggests state-level protections for rural aquifers

Water conservation expert Amy Vickers has some good legislative proposals to protect Massachusetts's water supply from for-profit exploitation in this op-ed from Monday's Boston Globe.

Putting a cap on the bottled water industry
By Amy Vickers

Over a half-billion dollars of Massachusetts' taxpayer money will be spent this year on clean drinking water program loans to communities, yet Beacon Hill has been strangely silent about - and invested not one penny in defense of - small- and often low-income rural towns that stand alone against what many see as a threat to their drinking water supplies: Swiss-based Nestlé Waters.

Nestlé, the old candy company that once spawned an international boycott of its products for proffering cheap infant formula as better than mother's milk to women in developing countries, now profits from what many say is sullying another sacred solution: the bottling of pristine waters. It may soon do this in some of the state's most water-stressed and fragile communities.

For more than a year, Nestlé and its well drillers, technical consultants, and lawyers have been quietly surveying the profit potential in the few remaining unspoiled springs and aquifers in Central and Western Massachusetts. In its attempts to strike blue gold, the firm has aggressively pursued water extraction deals that have many locals seeing red.

Two recent efforts by Nestlé to pursue pumping operations in small towns illustrate why withdrawals for commercial water bottling operations in our state pose unacceptable risks, not only to local drinking water supplies, but also to such natural assets as fisheries and conservation land. Last summer, Montague residents halted - at least for now -Nestlé's pursuit of the spring water beneath Montague Plains, a state wildlife management area that also recharges critical ground water for a state fish hatchery and the local wells on which many homes and farms depend.

This spring, after considerable public outcry, Clinton town officials appeared to have finally rejected Nestlé's bid to extract and export up to a quarter-million gallons of spring water a day - equal to 4 million servings of some of the cleanest drinking water in the state - from the nearly 600-acre Wekepeke Reservation land that Clinton owns in the town of Sterling. The offer posed several legal issues, not least the fact that Clinton's 19th-century water rights to the Wekepeke are for surface water - not spring water - and only for town public water supply needs.

Clinton stopped using Wekepeke water in the 1960s and the town is now supplied by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Sterling residents, 70 percent of whom rely on the Wekepeke for ground water to supply their home wells, were incensed and asked why another town would have the right to literally sell the water beneath their feet for global export to the highest bidder.

Since when has Massachusetts enjoyed a surplus of pristine drinking water supplies that multinational firms, not Bay State citizens, are considered more deserving to receive? The state classifies 70 percent of state river drainage basins as "flow-stressed." Since when have they been restored to such good health that we now have a surfeit of naturally clean freshwater ready for shipping to bottle-chugging out-of-staters - and this in an era in which we face unprecedented global warming, increased agricultural irrigation needs, and worsening water pollution, which requires skyrocketing treatment costs?

Leaders in government, business, religious, and spiritual movements across America are increasingly rejecting bottled water because of its indefensible environmental costs. It is time that this state also calls a halt to the aggressive intrusions of the bottled water industry into the vulnerable water sources that supply small-town homes, farms, and public conservation lands.

The Legislature should place an immediate statewide moratorium of at least two years on new bottled water extractions along with a cap on existing withdrawals.

In the meantime, an assessment of the state's available water supplies and needs - coupled with long-term climate change forecasts - must be made. Further, a statewide law must be enacted that affirms that the waters of Massachusetts shall be protected in perpetuity for its inhabitants, first and foremost, and that communities and aquifer protection areas may ban out-of-state water exports.

Unless it can be proven that Massachusetts has water to spare, there is no time to waste in stopping the bottled water industry from draining our most prized and irreplaceable sources of clean drinking water.

Amy Vickers, who lives in Amherst, is an engineer and water conservation consultant.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America: Corporate Control, Trade and Transport of Water

Fact Sheet #3 3/08
[Print, More SPP Info, SPP Action Alert, SPP Flyers]

Advancing the Corporatocracy
The Bush administration made an “end run” around Congress and the public to advance the emerging corporatocracy – government of, for and by the corporate elite -- to create the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). In 2005, the SPP was finalized without debate in Congress or public scrutiny when President Bush met with President Fox of Mexico and Prime Minister Martin of Canada in Waco, Texas, where they shook hands on the deal. Their joint statement explains:
“The SPP builds upon, but is separate from, our longstanding trade and economic relationships…This partnership has increased institutional contacts between the three governments to respond to a shared vision of a stronger, more secure and prosperous region.”

Moving Water - SPP SuperCorridors and Water Pipelines
SuperCorridor maps and plans already underway in Texas make clear that water pipelines are part of the overall SPP scheme. The Trans-Texas Corridor, part of the SuperCorridor planned to run from Mexico to Canada, through Kansas City, MO, provides the first clear evidence of this. www.nasco.com

Texas state law (HB 3588) allows the Texas Department of Transportation to lease land along the Corridor for any commercial or industrial purpose which could include drilling wells for water mining. Under the law, such enterprises apparently may not be subject to regulation by groundwater conservation districts. Outside of these districts, groundwater withdrawals are subject to the “right of capture,” i.e., landowners can pump water from under their own land without restriction.

NAFTA Trade Rules and Water
Because water is included in the list of commodities to which NAFTA applies, water transported commercially across a national border in North America will be subject to NAFTA trade rules that make it very difficult to limit the quantity of any commercial export. If Canada, the U.S. or Mexico, for any reason, tried to limit the quantity exported commercially, they would probably not survive a corporate challenge allowed under NAFTA rules.

What is It?

• The SPP vision of prosperity is production of “endless more” – sweat-shop produced goods from Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere carried by SuperCargo ships docking at SuperPorts and moved inland along privatized transportation corridors to inland “dry” ports.
  
  
• The SPP vision of prosperity promotes the plunder of the world’s diminishing natural resources and their long-distance transport by ship, truck and pipeline systems.

Where’s the Water - Where’s the Profit?

Today, Canada, the Great Lakes, Maine and southern Mexico have large quantities of fresh water, while water is already critically short in other areas of the U.S. Further, water pollution by industry, over-use of groundwater and aquifers, leaks from municipal systems, wasteful agricultural irrigation, and the impact of global warming on available water sources, create a scarcity which makes water a potential source for large profits – blue gold! Investors are lining up to profit from this scarcity.





Threats of Bulk Water Sales

Entrepreneurs and investors want to export water from Canada to the lucrative U.S. and global markets; however, the U.S. is the most likely market.

Leaked minutes of the 2004 meeting of the Task Force on the Future of North America, which drafted the SPP, boldly states:

“No item - not Canadian water, not Mexican oil…is ‘off the table’; rather contentious or intractable issues will simply require more time to ripen politically” …and “policy recommendations on these issues are best considered long-term goals.”

Knowing that investors viewed the Great Lakes as a source for water exports, especially to the dry U.S. southwest, Canadian and U.S. citizens successfully fought for an Annex Agreement to the Great Lakes Charter to prevent water diversions out of the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, the bottled water industry got an exemption for the export of bottled water. In addition, this agreement does not protect Canadian water outside of the Great Lakes basin from being exported to the U.S.

SPP and Bottled Water
The bottled water giants - Nestlé, Coke/Dannone, Pepsi, Crystal Geyser - are buying or leasing land for access to water resources, often siting bottling plants near the proposed SPP transportation SuperCorridor routes.

For example, Crystal Geyser Spring Water Bottling Company, located just northwest of Mt. Shasta in northern California, recently purchased 30 acres of land in the Shasta Business Park, part of the Shasta Valley Enterprise Zone, a state-designated economic development area, to construct what is billed as the largest spring water bottling plant in the world.

Interstate 5, from the Mexican border through CA, OR and WA to the Canadian border, is designated as the West Coast Corridor. Promoters of the Shasta Business Park advertise:

“We have all the great connections ….Located along Interstate 5, the largest truck corridor in the United States, the Shasta Valley Enterprise Zone is uniquely positioned to offer companies access to direct routes to Canada and Mexico, and all international sea and airports in between.”

Water Is a Right for People and Nature

Allowing commercial water sales and exports, including the selling of bottled water, sets a dangerous precedent for treating water as a commodity where the price is set by the marketplace. What will be the consequences when water is in short supply if we allow this to happen?

• Will communities be forced to compete with industry and agriculture for water?
• Will wealthy households and communities be able to buy water at any cost, leaving those less well off high and dry?
• Will nature be left high and dry as well?

Learn more about the SPP
• For action alerts, other flyers, poster, powerpoint presentations and articles go to www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/SPP
• Share your knowledge with your community, state legislators, and members of Congress.

Learn about local ordinances banning corporate takings of water and asserting the rights of nature at www.thealliancefordemocracy.org and www.celdf.org


Alliance for Democracy • 781-894-1179 • www.thealliancefordemocracy.org

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Alliance for Democracy and Barnstead NH Make History

First ordinance in the country to ban corporate theft of water and assert the rights of nature. Yes! magazine tells story of how the Alliance worked with citizens of Barnstead NH.

Communities Take Power
by Doug Pibel
The Citizens of Barnstead, New Hampshire, Used Local Law to Keep Corporate Giants Out of Their Water
Fall 2007: Stand Up to Corporate Power
YES! Magazine.

BARNSTEAD WATER RIGHTS & LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT ORDINANCE as amended October, 2008
This ordinance passed in Barnstead Town Meeting in March 2006 has now been amended by the Board of Selectmen in October 2007 to include the Rights of Nature. The people of Barnstead will vote on these amendments at their March 2008 Town Meeting.

The unamended version of the ordinance can be accessed here.
For another accounting of how the Barnstead Ordinance got passed, see “US: New Hampshire Town Bans Corporate Water Withdrawals” by Kat Bundy, Susquehanna June 1st, 2006

Town of Barnstead, NH
Barnstead Home Page

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Alliance for Democracy and Barnstead NH Make History

First ordinance in the country to ban corporate theft of water and assert the rights of nature

Communities Take Power

by Doug Pibel
The Citizens of Barnstead, New Hampshire, Used Local Law to Keep Corporate Giants Out of Their Water
Fall 2007: Stand Up to Corporate Power
YES! Magazine
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=1828

	Gail Darrell, center, and other Barnstead, New Hampshire, residents pressed for a law to counter the “tyranny and usurpation” of the people's right to govern themselves, especially with regard to water. Gordon Preston, left, and Jack O'Neil were two of five selectmen who supported the ordinance. Photo by Channing Johnson for YES! Magazine.www.channingjohnson.com

In 1819, the Supreme Court declared for the first time that corporations are entitled to protection under the Constitution. That case started in New Hampshire. Since then, corporations have been granted virtually all the rights constitutionally guaranteed to human beings. They use those rights to site polluting feedlots, dump toxic sludge, build big-box stores, and take municipal water to sell, all whether citizens want them to or not.

Now, New Hampshire townspeople are fighting to turn that around and put people, not corporations, in charge. What manner of revolutionaries are these? The kind you should expect in the United States: laborers, mothers, farmers, businessmen, and other ordinary citizens. They are people like Gail Darrell, a New Hampshire native who, 25 years ago, moved with her husband to the little town of Barnstead to raise their children in a rural environment. They are people like Barnstead Select Board member Jack O'Neil, a Vietnam veteran and George Bush voter.

What's These People's Problem?
Barnstead is located just south of New Hampshire's lakes region. The Suncook River runs through town, and four lakes are within the town limits. It's a water-rich community sitting on a big aquifer.

Which puts it in the crosshairs of corporate water miners. As bottled water has become a “must have” commodity generating nearly $10 billion a year in consumer spending, corporations have descended on communities like Barnstead and set up pumping operations. They extract hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day, bottle it, and ship it out for profit. Taking that much water raises the specter of lowered water tables and dry wells, infiltration of pollutants or saltwater, and damage to wetlands. The townspeople lose control of one of the necessities of life.

Barnstead residents watched as nearby Barrington and Nottingham fought to block multinational corporation USA Springs from taking their water. They saw those communities work through the state regulatory system and, after years of labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs, find themselves without a remedy. Corporations, they were told, have constitutional rights that limit what regulators can do with zoning or other land-use controls.

Gail Darrell and Diane St. Germaine, another Barnstead resident, didn't want their town to face the same expensive battle. They already had experience with the regulatory system, having worked to get the town to ban local dumping of Class A sewage sludge. Once that ban was in place, the corporations shipping the sludge simply got it reclassified as Class B biosolids, and the town was back to square one.

The full story is here: Communities Take Power
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More Information

BARNSTEAD WATER RIGHTS & LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT ORDINANCE

Summary of the process and situation leading up to Barnstead adopting this ordinance.

Town of Barnstead, NH Home Page

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has a Model Anti-Corporate Water Ordinance

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Bottled Water Boycotts: Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum

by Janet Larsen
Published on Thursday, December 13, 2007 by Earth Policy Institute
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/13/5817/

From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”

While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.

At the launch of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in October, Mayor Anderson of Salt Lake City described the “total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water.” He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.

In November, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of 5¢ on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86 percent of used water bottles in the United States ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden.

New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is naturally filtered in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with “Pure Tap.” Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle. (See list of other cities and initiatives.)

Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July that it would clearly label its Aquafina water as from a “public water source,” it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.

Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water consumption has soared. Annual consumption in the United States in 1976 was less than 2 gallons for every man, woman, and child; some 30 years later, Americans on average each now drink about 30 gallons of bottled water a year. (See data.)

All this hydration costs Americans more than $15 billion a year. The price of individual bottles of water ranges up to several dollars a gallon (and more for designer brands), while tap water is delivered directly to homes and offices for less than a penny a gallon. People complaining about $3-a-gallon gasoline may start to wonder why they are paying even more per gallon for bottled water.

With sales growing by 10 percent each year, far faster than any other beverage, bottled water now appears to be the drink of choice for many Americans-they swallow more of it than milk, juice, beer, coffee, or tea. (See data.) While some industry analysts are counting on bottled water to beat out carbonated soft drinks to top the charts in the near future, the burgeoning back-to-the-tap movement may reverse the trend.

In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the United States each year requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil.

After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent-enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.

Concerns about this high energy use and the associated contribution to climate change, along with worries about waste, are driving many groups back to tap water. The United Church of Canada is one of the religious groups abandoning bottled water for moral reasons. The Berkeley school district no longer offers bottled water. And after watching 3,000 empty bottles pile up each week, the Nashville law firm Bass, Berry, & Sims has stopped stocking bottled water.

Europeans have long led the world in per person consumption of bottled water. Italy tops the list worldwide, with Italians drinking 54 gallons per person in 2006. Italy is closely trailed in per capita consumption by the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, followed by France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain. (See data.)

Yet even in Western Europe the bottle is starting to lose clout. Rome, a city of many historic fountains, is promoting its tap water. Florence’s city council, schools, and other public offices offer only city water. In the United Kingdom, the Treasury and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have ceased offering bottled water at official functions. Bottled water sales in Scandinavia are projected to fall because of growing environmental concerns.

Even France, home to Evian, is seeing a sales slowdown. During a 2005 tap water promotion campaign in Paris, the water utility handed out refillable glass carafes. Now Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë serves only tap water at official events and encourages others to do the same. Total bottled water sales in France fell in 2004 and 2005, but rebounded in 2006.

Slowing sales may be the wave of the future as the bottle boycott movement picks up speed. With more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water, the $100 billion the world spends on bottled water every year could certainly be put to better use creating and maintaining safe public water infrastructure everywhere.

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