While Flint waits, Nestle pumps Michigan water on the cheap.
Why does Nestle get to make billions of dollars off of essentially free water while residents of Flint, Michigan, continue to wait for clean water?
“That is the question of the hour: Why is it essentially free?” says Liz Kirkwood, executive director of FLOW (For Love of Water), a Great Lakes water law and policy center.
“It’s because the state has not addressed the issue about bottled water.
In the state’s water withdrawal law of 2008, bottled water is an exception.
As more people lose trust in their local municipal water systems, the more people turn to bottled water, which becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy for water giants like Nestle.
“Nestle has indicated on their website that they have contributed to the Flint disaster by donating bottled water, but the rise of bottled water in this century is unprecedented.
It has a lot of deleterious effects, not only in eroding trust in public infrastructure but the whole ecological impact of using plastic, fossil-fuel-based bottles that end up in our landfills.” This isn’t the first time Nestle has landed itself in hot water over ground water.
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