One of the problems with Donald Trump’s proposed WALL along the Mexican border is that it divides ecosystems – so that animals that migrate across the border will be denied access to feeding and breeding grounds. Political boundaries often do not correspond to natural boundaries.
Centre County faces a similar challenge. Nestle – a Swiss multinational firm and the largest food and beverage company in the world – is teaming up with the Spring Township Water Authority to remove approximately 500,000 gallons of water per day from the Spring Creek watershed, even though Spring Township is only one of many communities in the watershed.
So where will all this water go? Into lots of plastic bottles. Nestle has proposed to mine water for yet another water bottling plant. Most likely, the water will get trucked down to the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. market, to satisfy consumers who fear that their tap water lacks the recommended daily allowance of plastic.
Citizens gather together to try and stop Nestle's plans of mining water in their communities.
Nestle has been exploring this project for years, but did not publicly announce their plans until January 3, 2018. That means that government officials in Spring and Benner Townships, and the Centre County Commissioners have hidden the proposal from the public. They waited until it was all but a done deal before making a pretense that this was a democratic decision. This lack of transparency by itself is enough to stop this debacle in its tracks. But there are a multitude of other reasons to shut Nestle down:
- Nestle has historically been a really bad neighbor. The company has a history of human rights abuses including harvesting its cocoa with slave labor and encouraging third world women to use Nestle’s infant formula in places where there is no safe drinking water. In other communities where it has built bottling plants it has taken more water than specified in the permit, it has sued communities when they refused to allow Nestle to increase its extraction, and it has depleted neighboring wells.
- The proposed Spring Creek well will decrease flow in Spring Creek, one of the most pristine trout streams in the United States.
- In a world that is already drowning in plastic waste, Nestle wants to sell billions more plastic bottles. Most plastic bottles are not recycled, and even if they are, since the polymers degenerate, the plastic can only be recycled once.
- The proposed bottling plant will have a large carbon footprint since the bottles will be trucked to their final destination and our roads will suffer from scores of trucks on the roads.
- Because Nestle is based in Switzerland, the profits from this operation will not stay in the United States.
The Sierra Club Moshannon Group is collaborating with the Nittany Valley Environmental Coalition, Clearwater Conservancy, and Trout Unlimited to stop Nestle dead in its tracks. To succeed, we need to make our voices heard. Please join the effort. Tell the Centre County Commissioners (Michael Pipe, Mark Higgins, and Steve Dershem – boc@centrecountypa.gov) that our most precious resource is more important than a few jobs promised by a disreputable company.
Consumers have the power to effect change. Looking for products to boycott? Here are some popular Nestle brands and products:
Buitoni, Carnation, Nestle’s Crunch, DiGiorno Pizza, Dreyer’s Ice Cream, Gerber, Haagen-Dazs, Kit-Kat Bars, Lean Cuisine, Nescafe, Perrier, Poland Spring, Pure Life, Purina, Stouffer’s Toll House Cookies, Tombstone Pizza.
Update:
Nestle is pulling out of the water bottling plant it was looking at building in Spring or Benner township. A company spokeswoman said Monday that Nestle Waters looks at several factors in deciding where to put a plant. Those include the quality and taste of the water, the sustainability of the site and the logistics of getting the product to market.
The spokeswoman also said that Centre County “remains a leading candidate in our search for a third Pennsylvania bottling factory location, with an initial investment of $50 million.” She said there are no specific areas the company is looking at in Centre County at this time. The company had recently opened an office in the Bellefonte area. The project had supporters, but also opponents.
Nittany Valley Environmental Coalition and the Sierra Club Moshannon Group issued a statement thanking the community for standing with us against Nestle Waters’ proposed plan to take millions of gallons of water from our aquifer and ship it out of the Spring Creek Watershed. "If Nestle should attempt to take water from our aquifer elsewhere in Centre County, we will be there to fight back," the statement said.
This article was writte by Ernest Boyd and is part of our Summer 2018 Sylvanian Newsletter. To read other articles from this issue, please click here.