Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [92]
The industry faced problems on the supply side, too, as tiny towns across the nation grew increasingly anxious about controlling their water. In the year after Bottlemania came out, Enumclaw, Washington, and Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, and Wells, Maine, rebuffed Nestlé’s advances on their groundwater. Shapleigh and Newfield, Maine, which sit atop the same aquifer, went a step further and banned the sale of their water outside their borders. In Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Tennessee, and Colorado, citizens called for restrictions on largescale withdrawals of groundwater for bottling. In northern Florida, after hundreds of residents demonstrated against spring-water pumping along the Santa Fe River, county regulators denied the company a withdrawal permit, citing unacceptable threats to river flow and spring levels.
A short time later, Florida Governor Charlie Crist proposed a six-cent-per-gallon state tax on water pumped by commercial bottlers. Nestlé countered with an alternative proposal to impose a six-cent tax on every bottle purchased by consumers. When a state representative in Maine introduced a bill calling for a penny-a-gallon tax on extractors, the company’s Mark Dubois said, “This reduces our ability to compete in a very competitive market.” The same argument was made on the other side of the world: When the Fijian government in mid 2008 taxed exports of Fiji Water, the American-owned company squawked until the tax was repealed.
The bottlers and their employees, naturally, feel the pain of 2008’s market contraction. After announcing double-digit declines in sales of Aquafina in the third quarter of that year, Pepsi cut 3,300 jobs; sales of Coca-Cola’s Dasani have also dipped. Blaming reduced demand, Nestlé Waters North America scaled back plans to build the world’s largest water bottling plant in McCloud, California, and laid off 78 percent of its Calistoga workforce. In February 2009, Nestlé announced that it had in the previous year reduced capital expenditure on its water business by $236 million, or 26 percent, and would henceforth focus on its low-cost Pure Life brand, derived from public water supplies. Perhaps the company’s appetite for fighting the guardians of rural springs was finally on the wane.
Are the days of bottled water numbered? The industry, at least in North America and Western Europe, is acting as if this were a distinct possibility, and fighting back hard. (Sales in Eastern Europe, China, Africa, and India remain strong as standards of living rise and, oftentimes, the quality or availability of public water supplies declines.) The International Bottled Water Association hired former tobacco-industry lobbyist Tom Lauria, who called on environmental groups and industry to work together to improve curbside recycling programs, municipal water infrastructure, and the protection of watersheds. With funding from the IBWA, the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute conjured the feisty EnjoyBottledWater.org, which aims to debunk every criticism ever lobbed at bottled water—from its sustainability to its quality—and trash its critics, too: the site calls lawmakers who want to more closely regulate bottled water “foolish” and environmentalists who condemn the bottled-water industry “awesomely stupid.”
Where individual bottlers had, so far, feared to tread, http://Enjoy BottledWater.org rushed in with such statements as: