Bizarre, Environment, Politics, Society

Nestlé Under Fire For Drawing Tens of Millions of Gallons Of Water For Sale While Paying Only $524 Under An Expired Permit

250px-Nestlé.svg220px-Drinking_waterThere is an interesting controversy brewing over the continued removal of water by Nestle from California’s water supply during the record drought in that state. Nestle continued to remove millions of gallons of water from the San Bernardino National Forest to sell as part of its Arrowhead bottled water brand. While the rest of the state is facing stringent water reductions, Nestles has been criticized for removing 27 million gallons of water from 12 springs in Strawberry Canyon under a permit that expired in 1988. The expired permit’s fee for the water, according to critics? $524.


The expired permit only adds to the controversy over not just the removal of water by the waste associated with bottled water. The company head Tim Brown however said that this is like complaining about the weather: “If I stop bottling water tomorrow, people would buy another brand of bottled water. It’s driven by consumer demand, it’s driven by an on-the-go society that needs to hydrate.”

Starbucks recently stopped bottling water in the state. However, there are a 110 bottlers in the state. Critics charge that it amounts to theft will companies point out that it remains a small percentage of water use in the state.

Nestle has launched a counteroffensive to answer questions and critics. The company says that it has tried to renew its permit with the federal government and has been told it can continue to draw water. It notes that its product is still a lot better than those “sugary drinks.” It adds:

How much water do you withdraw in California?
Less than 0.008% of the total. Nearly 50 billion cubic metres (13 trillion gallons) of water is used in California each year. Nestlé uses less than 4 million cubic metres (1 billion gallons) in all its operations. We operate five bottled water plants (out of 108 in the state) and four food plants. Our bottled water plants use around 2.66 million cubic metres (705 million gallons) of water a year.

Two questions remain (1) why a company should make billions on public water without greater revenue sharing for the public and (2) whether such draws should continue during drought periods. It is also clear that the permitting system run by the US Forest Service (USFS) is in shambles. Either the USFS should cut off these draws or permit them under a workable and mutually beneficial system. It is bizarre to leave companies for decades operating off of expired permits.

What do you think?

116 thoughts on “Nestlé Under Fire For Drawing Tens of Millions of Gallons Of Water For Sale While Paying Only $524 Under An Expired Permit”

  3. Olly
    Rhetoric is NOT science… thought you should know so that you can stop embarrassing yourself.

  5. Googling “Nestles California drought” brings up 526,000 results. The first one is a paid ad by Nestles. The next two ‘articles’ are from Nestles’ website:

    1) Nestlé and the California drought: your questions answered
    2) Is Nestlé contributing to the problem of water scarcity in California?

    Who’s their PR firm?

  6. “What I don’t get is why people refuse to understand the science behind the human driven climate change we are currently experiencing.”

    Max,

    What you don’t WANT to accept is their are people that actually DO understand the science behind your global cooling, I mean global warming, uh climate change argument; they just aren’t buying it. Your refusal to accept it is entirely understandable.

  7. can’t wait for the Harbaugh era to get underway in Ann Arbor…Thursday night the Wolverines will take the Utes to the woodshed…so it begins…

  8. Oh, and are we all enjoying the hottest summer on record, yet?
    July was the hottest month, globally, ever recorded.
    2015 will be hotter than 2014 was, pausers.

  9. Animal lines developed over eons of time…life came out of the water, undergoing the slow, inexorable changes of evolution…fishes were the first vertebrates…two classes, chondricthyes and later the true, or bony fishes, osteicthyes…over 20,000 extant species, marine and freshwater…and still counting

  11. Karen S.
    Yes, the globe has seen many different climate shifts. No one is denying this fact.
    What I don’t get is why people refuse to understand the science behind the human driven climate change we are currently experiencing. Frogs in a pot talking about how water get’s hot… it happened in the past, so, why worry? Silly frogs, you weren’t in that pot of water the last time the stove was turned on… ugh!

    1. Max-1 – since the ‘scientists’ are hiding the data from inspection by other scientists, there is no reason not to be skeptical of climate change. Did you know that 63% of scientific experiments cannot be duplicated? Do you know that NOAA is playing with the temperatures to make sure it is the hottest year on record? Do you know that the computers for forecasting climate change cannot accurately predict weather?

  13. oddly enough, nestle made some very good coffee…irrespective of the cocoa they provide

  14. And I don’t think I’ll be saying much after 100 years. Just saying . . .

  15. Max – Let me explain. CA, as with the rest of the globe, has had massive climate shifts throughout history. You can go to Malibu and look at the ancient sea level far above us on the cliffs, from when the Earth was warmer, and the polar caps melted.

    For a long period of time, the natural state of CA was Mega Drought. Many ecologists are concerned that CA might return to that ecology, which would severely limit the population the state could sustain.

    Our poor leadership is reflected in several things – the conflicting water policies (fountains bubbling away at shopping centers while wells are capped), lack of building more reservoirs, encouraging massive illegal immigration which deluges the state in unsustainable population growth because people just won’t go through proper channels, poor landscape design, encouraging the replacement of lawns with plastic turf instead of native plants or water wise lawns like UC Verde.

    Our massive state is mired in government inefficient bureaucracy. Sometimes it seems like Monty Python is running things.

  16. Karen S.
    Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to reference a time pre-European expansion Westward as a normal (100+ years) while decrying the current situation as terrible and a sign of poor leadership when clearly it has been less than ten years a drought?

    I’m sorry, but if the former of 100+ years a drought was ‘NORMAL’… why the gnashing of teeth. Really.
    When we hit year 100 of this drought, then you should say something. NO?

  17. There is no one solution for what seems to be one problem.
    -Every time you fill up a plastic water bottle from a gallon jug you cut your plastic footprint in half.
    -Every time you put a quarter in a water vendor at a supermarket and fill up a plastic gallon jug, you cut that plastic footprint in half.
    -Using gallon jugs to transport water from the supermarket to home and using reusable containers for convenience cuts out the plastic footprint almost entirely.
    -Most swimming pools recycle their water through a filtration system. What is evaporated comes back-supposedly.
    -Golf courses should be limited to the lush areas being on the greens and not ‘everywhere’.
    -Natural, low water need, landscaping should be subsidized through higher costs for landscape water, golf course water, etc.
    -Pay at the pump.
    -More reservoirs to capture rain and run off in wet years will offset dry years.
    -In short we must ‘smarten up’.

    However, here in NorthEast Florida it has been raining cats and dogs going on two weeks. We’re thinking of putting in a pool.

    1. issac – couple of things 1) in Arizona, home of the golf course, they are watered with reused water 2) I have been trying to kill the grass in my backyard so I can put in desert landscaping. However, we have been getting just enough rain to keep it alive. Spotty, but alive.

  19. The Olivenhain reservoir is small potatoes, 24k acre feet. Here is a list of the top 10 reservoirs in CA, the smallest of these is 1 MILLION acre feet. The most recent was built in 1979: http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26444134/california-drought-why-doesnt-california-build-big-dams?source=infinite

    Here is a good example, of many, of bureaucratic entities mis-managing water: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/california-spend-4-billion-gallons-water-fish/

    The feds asked to flush 12k acre feet to save 6 fish. 12k acre feet is HALF of the Olivenhaim reservoir. That’s after 15k was already flushed to the ocean to save 23 fish. So those two bureaucratic commands combined, the Olivenhaim reservoir would be empty.

  20. Karen – I am not sure who put in your water softener, but I had the same problem. They can come out and adjust it to make it work right.

    Right now we are getting early snow melt which is filling our dams, which is a problem. We usually get the same rain you do in the winter, so if it is a wet winter we will have floods and will have to open the dams, which closes roads for weeks.

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