A 325-page lawsuit filed in Connecticut this week by eleven plaintiffs claims that for more than 20 years, Nestlé Waters’ marketing and sales of Poland Spring water has been “a colossal fraud perpetrated against American consumers.”If the water in your area is sketchy, purified bottled drinking water is usually cheap enough.
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Noting that Nestlé bottles 1 billion gallons of Poland Spring water per year, the complaint points out that even if the eight sites the company uses to bottle water did contain a spring, it would have to flow at an average rate of 245 gallons per minute. That’s more force than a two-inch diameter fire hose spraying at 40 pounds per square inch.
“Such a spring would be plainly visible – more like a geyser than a spring – and undoubtedly well known,” the lawsuit states. “Yet there is no photographic proof that even one such spring – much less eight – exists on or near defendant’s sites in Maine.”
To that end, the complaint claims there is no historical evidence for six of the purported springs, and that two are former springs that no longer exist.
“The famous Poland Spring in Poland Spring, Maine, which Defendant’s labels claim is a source of Poland Spring Water, ran dry nearly 50 years ago, decades before Defendant bought the Poland Spring brand name,” reads the lawsuit. “The ‘spring’ Defendant now claims exists in Poland Spring is at the bottom of a lake. It has never been proven to exist, and the evidence that Defendant itself filed with Maine regulators shows it does not exist.”
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8 comments:
Nestle pays $524 a year to pump 36 million gallons of water from the ground in Southern California each year, and did so all during the drought.
http://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/nestle-gets-away-pumping-californias-water-next-nothing/
-Doug in Oakland
Or , for about 1/50th the cost per gallon, you can get a water filter that fits on your sink tap.
I find it interesting that folks think that bottled water with a fancy label is somehow better. In many places, municipal tap water is better and cleaner than bottled water, and a LOT of bottled water IS filtered municipal water.
Good to see the lawsuit, if it is really just well water though.
Meh, most of the 'bottled water' is nothing more than recycled tap water, run through a filter.
There are places in the country where drinking bottled or filtered water is a good idea, especially in mining country.
There are places where drinking bottled water might be a sign of being a moron, such as New York City.
Not to mention the bottles themselves are made out of oil, and have a very short non-carcinogenic shelf life.
One of the slickest acts out corporate post "9/11" grift I've ever seen: when I was still working fire line the government mandated all potable on-site water to be bottled. On any given day a logistics nightmare. We were flying bags of bottles of water to thirsty firecrews that didn't necessarily make it back to the recycle bin. And! (we are talking about the gubermint) Flying bags of emptied water bottles back to the recycle bin. Nestle, and Coca-Cola.
Don't get me started on all the hoyty toyty foo-foo beers that get brewed and bottled for export at an obscene profit around here. We have our own corner on the bottled water market, Earth2O, now owned by PepsiCo but who has never made the claim beyond water out of a two thousand foot natural well (volcanic vent) tapping a perhaps two million year old pocket of water... that no one knows how big it is, how much water is in it or indeed how even to measure how big it is. These beers are misnamed for the river that runs through town, the water comes from an aquifer we don't know anything about: don't know how big, don't know how much water, don't even know how to measure. Fact is, around here at least, with our ninety million year volcanic history, aquifers are something we know almost nothing about. About all we do know is that putting the two-thirds or so of the water wasted in the brewing of beers for export at an obscene profit "back into the river" is not putting it back into the aquifer. You're not going to hear that from the brewers.
Water is the new oil. Budweiser doesn't want to buy these breweries because that make better beer, Budweiser wants to buy them because of their percieived lock on a sizable water source.
"About all we do know is that putting the two-thirds or so of the water wasted in the brewing of beers for export at an obscene profit "back into the river" is not putting it back into the aquifer."
Right. There were some farmers in Southern California who let the floodwaters stand on their fields last spring because they have been pumping up so much groundwater during the last several years because of the drought that the aquifers are depleted. They knew they were depleted because they had to drill deeper to get to them. I don't know how much it helped, but they seemed to know what they were doing. Water is important stuff down there.
-Doug in Oakland
I good friend of mine in Waterboro Maine had his well go dry because Poland Spring pumped enough water to drop the water table during last year's dry spell. He really hated having to buy his drinking water from Poland Spring. He said the water had a faint taste of irony.
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