Written by Ellie Cabell
We in the Western U.S. are accustomed to battles over water between agricultural and urban consumers. Now clean, clear, delicious water has become so precious, even the bottled water ubiquitous in our lives is being contested.
The Nestle water brand Arrowhead pumps as much as 200 gallons of spring water per minute from wells it owns in Chaffee County along the Arkansas River. It trucks this water to Denver where it is bottled and distributed throughout North America. Nestle offsets the water it extracts by releasing water directly into the Arkansas River.
Groups like Unbottle and Protect Chaffee County Water oppose renewing Nestle’s 2009 lease permitting them to extract and remove this water. They object to the basic principle of selling people water they already own. More, they object to ever more plastic water bottles fouling our lands and seas, powered by fossil fuels used to produce the plastic, and to transport the water.
Battles like this these will continue and grow worse as water becomes increasingly scarce. IX Power Clean Water systems can mitigate these battles by cleaning large quantities of polluted water making it available for reuse. – post by Ellie Cabell