The Rural Voice, 1999-05, Page 22Bottling anger
While Grey and Bruce farmers worry about dry wells and lack of
water, bottling companies want to tap springs and underground
aquifers to sell pure bottled water to city customers
By Keith Roulston
Farmers in Grey and Bruce
counties who suffered through
drought in the summer of 1998
and a lack of snow and rain all fall,
winter and spring, may find it ironic
but their counties are seen as an
untapped source of water by
companies looking to cash in on the
booming consumer demand for
bottled water.
It's an irony Paul Bonwick, MP
for Simcoe Grey, noted recently as he
worked with local groups to try to
slow down the momentum of
companies wanting to take water
from springs and wells in the region.
The area had to be declared a disaster
area because of drought in 1998 and
it hardly makes sense, he says, to
allow companies to take millions of
litres of water a day from the local
water system when the arca has been
short of water.
The current controversy has been
stirred up because a company has
applied for permission to truck water
from a spring near Flesherton to its
bottling plant in Toronto. The
18 THE RURAL VOICE
Ministry of Environment is now
considering the application after a
group in the Flesherton area quickly
organized and collected 2400 names
on a petition asking that the permit to
take water not be issued.
This particular application is just
the tip of the iceberg, say those
concerned about the issue of water
taking. Bonwick notes three areas of
the province have been identified as
having high quality spring water that
is easily accessible for export. Since
it costs very little to set up a well-
head operation to store water for
loading trucks and since spring water
has become such a valuable
commodity with consumers, the
number of applications to take water
is bound to increase.
Carl Anders, head of Water
Protection Coalition of South Grey,
the group formed to oppose the
Flesherton application, says a
company can sell pure spring water
for $1 a gallon, making the
investment to buy land, get a permit
and put in the loading facilities for
Bottled water has become a huge
consumer industry bur rural
residents worry what left when the
water's gone.
trdcks tiny by comparison to the
potential return.
The concern about water -taking is
not a new one. Since a bottling
company bought the rights to export
water from the Formosa spring
earlier this decade, local residents
have worried about the effect.
Around the same time there was
consternation in Grey County when a
company bought a farm with several
wells from which it planned to truck
water to Toronto to use in
reconstituted fruit juices.
Still, it's hard to get people
worked up about the issue until a
company actually starts taking water
right in their back yard. People see
such enormous quantities of water
around them and they find it hard to
believe that a few truckloads of water
a week can make much difference,
Bonwick says.
"I think we have to be so
incredibly cautious when we're
dealing with this resource," Bonwick
says, noting much of the water will
be exported south of the border and
will be lost from the local water
cycle. Water, he says, is not like fish
or not like trees that can be
replenished. Water is part of a mini -
ecosystem and if water is taken out in
quantities that don't allow the system
to replenish itself it affects
everything from the fish population
to the tree population to farmers'
wells. Taking large quantities of