Nestle Water Bottling Operation In California Could Be Stopped

The Nestle company, known in these parts for their "Ice Mountain" brand of bottled water from a wetland in Michigan, could be forced out of the water bottling business in one California town by a series of new state standards.

Nestle is an aggressive marketer of bottled worldwide under various brands: the Michigan operation had its origins in the proposed Perrier water bottling operation kicked out of Wisconsin by conservationists some years earlier.

Seems the tough regulatory effort in California is being led by the Attorney General with the very recognizable name of Jerry Brown.

Carrying around water in petroleum-consuming plastic bottles has become something of an affectation of late: tap water is many times cheaper, and doesn't produce the wasteful bottles or trucking expenses to deliver them.

The biggest loophole in the Great Lakes Compact was permission for water bottling firms to ship unlimited quantities of water permanently away from the Great Lakes basin in containers smaller than 5.7 gallons.

That was a sop to water-rich Michigan, a sign of an economy so weak in a once-powerful industrial state that Michigan would demand language in the Compact to protect a relative handful of jobs at its state's water bottling operation.

The Compact is working its way through Congress because most of the agreement's conservation and anti-diversion provisions do help sustain the Great Lakes - - 20% of the entire planet's supply of fresh surface water.

Individual states in the eight-state Compact agreement could bar the export of bottled water away from the Great Lakes basin.

I suspect that as bottled water bans spread from west to east, there will come a day that outlawing bottled water exports that leave the Great Lakes basin will take hold in Wisconsin and neighboring states.

That is, if we are really serious about water sustainability, we'll stem the bottle-by-bottle diversion of water from the Great Lakes basin in plastic containers that too often end up in the gutter, vacant yards and landfills.