“Under pressure from environmental groups’ lawsuits, the U.S. Forest Service has begun a comprehensive environmental review of Switzerland-based bottled water giant Nestle’s Corp. continuing operations in a San Bernardino Mountain canyon,” the San Bernardino Sun reported. “Since its permit expired, in 1988, Nestle has been drawing what now amounts to millions of gallons of water from the rugged Strawberry Canyon in the San Bernardino Mountains, north of San Bernardino. Under Forest Service regulations, expired special use permits, like what Nestle has, remain in effect until they are either renewed or denied.”

According to the lawsuit filed against Nestle, that policy led to an explicit green light for its unique consumption arrangement. “The Forest Service has allowed pipeline operators to continue transporting water about four miles, from a series of bore holes and tunnels to a storage tank near California 18, without more stringent review required after the original permit was issued in 1976,” the Los Angeles Times observed at the time of the suit’s filing.

Sharp demands

That arrangement incurred the wrath of environmentalists. Even though Nestle’s renewal application is pending — meaning it’s legal for the company to continue its operations — its impact on the state’s ecology amid the current drought became the focus of a sweeping lawsuit, pressing the federal government to take action. “The Forest Service was sued in October by environmental and public interest groups who allege the Swiss-based company is operating its Strawberry Canyon pipeline on a permit that expired in 1988,” the Associated Press noted. “The groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, said the prolonged drought in California combined with the water operation is affecting wildlife.” According to the wire, the CBD and other groups “believe species, including Least Bell’s Vireo and California spotted owls, could see their numbers increased with improved water supply, the lawsuit said.”

The CBD counts The Story of Stuff Project and the Courage Campaign Institute among its fellow plaintiffs. Warning that Nestle has siphoned off “between 50m-150m gallons of water each year from a creek in the southern Californian forest to use in its Arrowhead bottled water brand,” the Guardian reported, those groups asked the Forest Service “to immediately turn off the water spigot and conduct a permit review, assessing the environmental impact of Nestlé’s operations.” Courage Campaign environmental director Eddie Kurtz called Nestle’s consumption of “public water” both illegal and immoral, according to the Guardian.

Managing protests

For its part, the Forest Service has sought to placate activist groups while initiating the review process. When pressed by CREDO, a self-styled progressive activist organization, the Forest Service responded that it had cautioned Nestle about the prospect of future restrictions on its water consumption. According to CREDO, the Forest Service indicated that, “should the drought continue, as we all expect it will, the state or local authorities may make further demands for conservation measures from all water users.”

Nestle had the local California media to blame for the initial scrutiny surrounding its arrangement with the Forest Service. “The legal action comes on the heels of an investigation this year by the Desert Sun,” as the Los Angeles Times noted. “Jody Noiron, supervisor for the San Bernardino National Forest, told the paper afterward that re-issuance of the permit would become a priority for the agency.”

After the Sun’s coverage, the story quickly gained steam across the state and the country. Protesters gathered to challenge Nestle face to face, while a nationwide movement to push bottling operations out of California succeeded in causing Starbucks to relocate its sourcing. “But others have continued to bottle water despite the drought. Wal-Mart, for example, still bottles water in California, as do companies at more than 100 other plants that are still licensed to bottle water in the state,” Business Insider noted at the time.

At the protests, in Los Angeles and Sacramento, activists delivered more than 500,000 signatures from people in California and around the country who signed onto a series of urgent petitions to Nestlé executives, Governor Brown, the California State Water Resources Control Board,  and the U.S. Forest Service urging an immediate shutdown of Nestlé’s bottling operations across the state.

“With people across California doing their part to conserve water — it’s time that Nestlé did the right thing and put people over profits — by immediately halting their water bottling operations across the State,” wrote Tim Molina in a press release. He is the strategic campaign organizer for the California-based Courage Campaign. “If Nestlé won’t do what’s right to protect California’s precious water supply, it is up to Governor Brown and the California Water Resource Control Boards to step in and stop this blatant misuse of water during our state’s epic drought.”

The Desert Sun conducted an investigation on bottling practices in March and found that Nestlé has been operating on a permit that expired back in 1988. The findings continue as follows:

[blockquote style=”3″]

• “No state agency is tracking exactly how much water is used by all of the bottled water plants in California, or monitoring the effects on water supplies and ecosystems statewide. The California Department of Public Health regulates 108 bottled water plants in the state, collecting information on water quality and the sources tapped. But the agency says it does not require companies to report how much water they use.
• “That information, when collected piecemeal by state or local agencies, often isn’t easily accessible to the public. In some cases, the amounts of water used are considered confidential and not publicly released.
• “Even as Nestle Waters has been submitting required reports on its water use, the Forest Service has not been closely tracking the amounts of water leaving the San Bernardino National Forest and has not assessed the impacts on the environment.
• “While the Forest Service has allowed Nestle to keep using an expired permit for nearly three decades, the agency has cracked down on other water users in the national forest. Several years ago, for instance, dozens of cabin owners were required to stop drawing water from a creek when their permits came up for renewal. Nestle has faced no such restrictions.
• “Only this year, after a group of critics raised concerns in letters and after The Desert Sun inquired about the expired permit, did Forest Service officials announce plans to take up the issue and carry out an environmental analysis.”[/blockquote]

A recent poll by Forbes noted that 65 percent of Americans believe that Nestlé “should stop using California water to create bottled water.”

But Bruce Maiman from the Sacramento Bee reported Nestlé uses 80 million gallons per year, in comparison to the 65 trillion gallons of water that the state normally receives. He noted Nestlé’s bottling operations are “troubling” but halting them will likely solve nothing.

Nestlé has responded to harsh criticism in a variety of statements and outlined the impact of their operations in California, stating that the water they source from the state is “used efficiently and effectively, and bottled so that it can be drunk as part of a healthy diet.” The amount of water that Nestlé withdraws is “[l]ess than 0.008 percent 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 2.75 million cubic metres (725 million gallons) of water a year.”

Even if Nestlé were to shut down all of its bottling plants in California, “the resulting annual savings would be less than 0.3 percent of the total the governor says the state needs residential and public users to save.”

Proponents of the new push hoped to capitalize on the bad publicity hitting the bottled water industry, where several suppliers have come under scrutiny for drawing their water from California. This month, “Starbucks announced that it would begin a process to move the bottling operations for its Ethos water brand to Pennsylvania,” NBC News reported. Nestle, meanwhile, refused to stop sourcing its water from public lands in the Golden State, although its pumping permit expired decades ago, and activists have petitioned the California Water Resources Control Board to halt the practice.

“The attention on Nestlé’s permit bumped it to the front of the pile for renewal review. The process will take at least 18 months, Heil said. Meanwhile, Nestlé can continue to operate in the forest as long as the company continues to pay the annual fee of $524 on the expired permit and operate under its provisions.”

Feeling the heat, Nestle Waters North America’s Tim Brown took to the San Bernardino Sun to vouch that California bottling operations should not be considered water-wasting culprits. “Our latest conservation measures include a waste-water recovery project expected to save annually 25 million gallons of water,” he wrote. “We supported the recent water bond to improve infrastructure and protect and restore watersheds and ecosystems and we believe that California’s new groundwater management legislation is a step in the right direction.”

Public skepticism

Yet, “despite the extensive science that goes into cleansing recycled water down to its molecular construction, in a recent study, 13 percent of adults said they would point-blank refuse to try it,” according to The Week. “Similar efforts in the past to jumpstart the recycled water trend in the state have failed.”

California’s long history with recycled water projects has lent credence to those who expect the pattern to continue. “Enticing people to drink recycled water […] requires getting past what experts call the ‘yuck’ factor,” as the New York Times observed. “Efforts in the 1990s to develop water reuse in San Diego and Los Angeles were beaten back by activists who denounced what they called, devastatingly, ‘toilet to tap.’ Los Angeles built a $55 million purification plant in the 1990s, but never used it to produce drinking water; the water goes to irrigation instead.”

Orange County officials, however, have brightened hopes for the recycled water movement. As Southern California Public Radio suggested, the O.C.’s successful recycling program has underscored why “calling it ‘toilet to tap’ isn’t fair.”

“The recycled sewage water makes quite a journey on its path to purification before it comes out of faucets at home. About 2.4 million Orange County residents get their water from a massive underground aquifer, which, since 2008, has been steadily recharged with billions of gallons of purified wastewater.”

According to SCPR, Orange County Water District officials overcame the yuck factor “with a massive public relations campaign that involved more than 2,000 community presentations.”

In Santa Clara County, where recycled water has been steadily employed for non-drinking uses, San Jose’s public figures have kicked off a similar effort. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews, and others held a recent press conference around their own consumption of recycled water, the Contra Costa Times reported. “‘Delicious,’ said Liccardo, as cameras clicked. ‘Good stuff!’ said Matthews, as video rolled.”

Nudging state law

At the statewide level, fans of recycled water had a bit more news to cheer as well. In Sacramento, the author of a string of recycled water-use bills stretching across the several years, Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, recently secured committee support for Assembly Bill 1463, another proposal pushing the approach to conservation. “Gatto’s legislation to help reduce the barriers for onsite-water recycling and allow more Californians to participate in safe and sustainable recycled-water practices was approved by the Assembly’s Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee on a 15-0 vote,” according to California Newswire.