CommentsCOMMENTARY - That was the slogan I grew up with in the early 60s but, these days, Nestlé makes neither a good neighbor nor a good corporate citizen.
And now BlueTriton Brands, purchaser of Nestlé’s North American water empire, is challenging California’s State Water Resources Control Board along with various environmental groups and concerned individuals to entrench its ability to continue, like Nestlé, to steal 60 million gallons of California water a year to bottle for corporate profit.
During the drought that in 2015 led then-Governor Jerry Brown to sign a law requiring a 25% mandatory cut in water use, water conservationists, environmentalists and nature enthusiasts joined in protest against Nestlé piping tens of millions of gallons of water out of California’s San Bernardino National Forest.
There was no fee for Nestlé’s use of the water.
The Swiss-based international conglomerate had been bottling and selling it at an incredible mark-up using a permit that had expired in 1988, and that it had been pumping far more than the permit allowed. Almost every year since the late 1940s.
After the initial outcry and while environmental groups were still pursuing the matter through the courts, the Forest Service in 2018 granted Nestlé a three-year permit that allowed for two additional one-year extensions.
It also mandated Nestlé perform environmental and hydrologic studies and reduce pumping “if monitoring shows that water extraction is impacting surface water flow.”
Last year Nestlé sold its North American water operations for $4.3 billion to One Rock Capital Partners, a private equity firm, which rechristened the company as BlueTriton Brands.
The sale served to divest Nestlé from ongoing challenges in courts and in environmental degradation and the plastic pollution it fostered as well as an attempt at damage control due to their fear that the accelerating anger at the company and their business practices on the bottled water front might spill over to their other products.
It also fueled Nestlé’s aggressive growth into other areas it perceived as being more profitable that the competitive North America water market.
Unfortunately, the sale also solidified corporate control of clean drinking water in the United States. Water should be a public right, but these kinds of deals place water control squarely in the control of Wall Street interests where profit trumps those of Main Street. Every time.
The cloyingly saccharine April 6, 2021 release promoting c’s takeover has since come under attack due to characterizing its water operations as “responsibly sourced, and sustainably packaged regional spring water” even as it continues to drain aquifers in places as far apart as Wisconsin, Maine, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Ontario, Canada.
BlueTriton is going to have to do far better than simply state at the end of its release that it is “committed to creating shared value and being a good neighbor in the more than 120 communities where it operates in the United States and Canada” to have any credibility beyond the C-suite.
Given that private equity firms are aggressively focused on short term profits and generally choose to disregard any regulation they think they can safely ignore, it does not sound as if BlueTriton is going to be any improvement over Nestlé.
Last year, after determining that Nestlé could legally divert only 2.4 million gallons of the 60 million or so they have been taking annually, the California’s State Water Resources Control Board issued a draft order for the company to “cease and desist” from taking most of the water they had been pumping in the San Bernardino mountains and bottling under its Arrowhead brand.
Then the new owner challenged the ruling before it could go for final approval by the State Water Board and applied for formal transfer of Nestlé’s license to them mandated by the sale.
The hearing began on January 10 with deep-pocket BlueTriton's legal team expounding on the right to all the water the company wants.
These are high-power corporate lawyers who are accustomed to rolling roughshod over and through regulatory complaints, and having judges side with their opposition to any evidence presented to the contrary.
Rather than a pro-forma transfer of license, BlueTriton now faces local whistleblowers, the general public and environmental groups who are well-seasoned in fighting Nestlé’s greed.
Despite the water company’s lawyers claiming these should not have any standing, the Hearing Officer, Alan Lilly, has made it clear that he will allow all parties to have an equal voice.
Next Monday, on January 31, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Story of Stuff Project and individuals fighting for proper stewardship of the water will pursue their case.
It will be an uphill battle as our system in recent times has tended to side with corporate interests.
Private equity firms rarely take over companies with the intention of investing in them and improving relationships with communities.
Their focus tends to be to take as much profit in the shortest period of time and then dump the dregs before environmental and labor laws catch up with them.
Water regulations vary state to state and region to region across the United States. Generally most eastern states allow landowners to bottle water as long as there isn’t “measurable diminishment” of water levels and flow while California and other western states allow landowners to lower water levels as long as downstream neighbors aren’t seriously harmed.
The company that is now BlueTriton appears to be in gross violation on both sides of the country and activists are hoping to considerably curtail what many term its theft of American water. Especially in drought-impacted Southern California.
And Nestlé, as prior owner, has a long history of bribing local politicians and civic groups to get what they want and look the other way when they take more, and egregiously skirt applicable laws.
Even as the residents of Flint couldn’t afford their bills for poisonous water, Nestlé was pumping clean water nearby at bottom-basement rates.
Nestlé’s outrageous history as a terrible corporate citizen goes back at least to the 1970s when it was employing representatives wearing nurse’s uniforms to push infant formula on mothers in third-world countries. Once the gifts and free samples were gone, poor families were hooked on an expensive product that was nowhere near as healthy as mother’s milk.
It is also facing serious kickbacks around the world with regard to their unsustainable business practices in chocolate production, ignoring complaints over palm oil clear-cutting and child slave labor.
In fact, Nestlé makes one of the very best object lessons for forced divestment of international conglomerates.
The title of The Story of Stuff’s campaign against the corporate behemoth, “Meet Nestlé’s Troubled Waters” is a reference to the Seth Siegal book Troubled Water. Subtitled “What’s Wrong With What You Drink,” it’s a hard-hitting look at the sad state of the drinking systems in the United States.
Other important books on water issues include Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (the 2018 edition with the Lawrie Mott postscript), and Vendana Shiva’s Water Wars.
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)