Sunday, August 14, 2005

Bottled-water dispute could weaken control over Lakes

Environmentalists say Nestle's freedom to tap into Michigan water supply sets a bad precedent.

By Brad Heath / The Detroit News

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EVART, Mich. -- The biggest battle over plans to siphon water from the Great Lakes and sell it someplace else isn't about pipelines or tanker ships.

It's about little plastic bottles.

It began when Nestle Waters North America asked to bottle water tapped from city wells in Evart, a tiny crossroads 80 miles north of Grand Rapids and 60 miles from the Lake Michigan shore. But it quickly spilled over into a legal tumult that environmentalists say could all but undermine the ability of Michigan and other Great Lakes states to keep other parts of the country from tapping into the continent's biggest freshwater supply.

The dispute also casts into sharp relief questions about how best to protect the Lakes against much bigger diversions, how the water should be used, and whether protections should extend beyond the Lakes to the vast underground supplies of water that feed them.

"If we're going to let anyone come into Michigan and take our water and divert it, how long can that go on?" said Terry Swier, one of the founders of a conservation group in nearby Mecosta County that has battled the Nestle bottling plant there. That plant would bottle the water drawn from Evart's wells.

The state's answer came in May when it agreed to let Nestle buy Evart's water -- but only if it wouldn't be sold outside the Great Lakes Basin.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration said the ban also will apply to other companies seeking permits from the state in the future, but it won't impact existing plants. The state has already issued permits for at least 43 other bottling operations, including Abso-Pure Water Co., which sells groundwater from Jackson County, though many of the operations are smaller.

Nestle fired back in state and federal lawsuits, challenging the state's rules and arguing that a federal law giving states the power to prohibit water from being diverted outside the basin unconstitutionally intrudes on interstate commerce.

"It's a shaky house, and we were pushed into it," Nestle lawyer Michael Haines said. "We have no interest whatsoever in attacking these laws, but if they're going to be pushed on us to prevent normal interstate commerce ... we don't have any choice."

Ultimately, officials say preventing any kind of diversion -- in bottles or tanker ships -- will require sturdier rules. For four years, the eight states and two Canadian provinces surrounding the Lakes have been negotiating a binding agreement to control withdrawals. A draft of the plan would virtually ban most efforts to siphon Great Lakes water -- including groundwater -- in bulk but would permit bottling operations like Nestle's.

"The water is in very small packages. It's not like you ship bottled water to other communities and people do their laundry or wash their dogs with it," Nestle spokeswoman Deborah Muchmore said.

But little packages can add up to a lot. Nestle ultimately wants to take up to 168 million gallons a year from Evart -- slightly more than an Ontario company had planned to ship from Lake Superior to Asia before a public outcry forced it to abandon that plan.

"What's the difference if water's leaving in a tanker going to Asia or if it's leaving in 12-ounce bottles going to Asia?" said David Holtz, Michigan director of Clean Water Action, an environmental group that lobbies on water-use issues. "The idea that a company can come in and buy Great Lakes groundwater and ship it out of the basin for sale is a really dangerous precedent."

For Evart, the calculation wasn't that complex -- or that controversial. When a plastics factory that is one of the city's major employers -- and by far its biggest water user -- said it was cutting back water use, Evart offered to sell some of that unused water to Nestle. Officials hoped the deal, now on hold, would give the city a leg up when Nestle starts looking for a place to build an additional Midwest bottling plant.

"We looked at it as a win-win situation," City Manager Roger Elkins said.