HOW NESTLÉ IS WORKING TO IMPROVE CALIFORNIA’S WATERWAYS

W hat if we could keep plastic bottles out of rivers, streams, and lakes across California? And if the bottles do wind up in waterways, what if the companies that produced them in the first place wanted them back? A big part of that is about designing plastic products to be recycled at a high quality while minimizing their impact on the environment. It’s also about bottled water companies taking responsibility for their products and engaging people to steward local water resources. The company leading this charge in California might surprise you. Nestlé Waters takes a multipronged approach to this work – and it starts with engaging with local communities to find solutions that can cut down on the number of plastic bottles that end up in our waterways. The company has established local partnerships with groups that are encouraging communities to connect with their waterways and create shared value – the concept that the health of the company and the community are dependent on one another. This is helping to raise awareness that litter can become debris in rivers and streams. For example, Nestlé Waters’ Arrowhead® Brand 100% Mountain Spring Water is collaborating with the Inland Empire Waterkeeper – a local grassroots organization – to launch a multiyear watershed improvement project called Crest to Coast. This project is helping to link communities to the river through stewardship around debris. The project has already helped remove 15,500 pounds of debris from the Santa Ana River and its tributaries. At a Crest to Coast cleanup in August, volunteers hauled out 8,000 pounds of trash from Mill Creek – which is a tributary of the Santa Ana River. And on a recent weekend, over 200 Nestlé Waters volunteers participated in a cleanup at the mouth of the Santa Ana River at Huntington Beach in Orange County – helping illustrate that debris from the river can eventually get out to the ocean. Tam Pham, wells and springs supervisor for Arrowhead, pulled a rake through the water alongside other volunteers at Mill Creek. “We all live in southern California,” he said. “The water from the mountains runs into the rivers, which goes down into Orange County. So everyone’s connected through the water.”

Watershed restoration projects are just one part of Nestlé Waters’ water stewardship commitment to California. Across the state, Nestlé Waters uses a team of scientists and engineers to collect sitespecific water use data and determine if – and when – it may be necessary to adjust its water withdrawals or spring sourcing strategy. “One of our desires is to create the most minimal footprint we can have in the environments we work in. Our goal is to protect our spring sites and keep them beautiful into the future,” says Larry Lawrence, who is responsible for managing Nestlé Waters’ spring sources in the Western United States. And while most plastic bottles are made out of material called polyethylene terephthalate (PET), Nestlé Waters has also focused on introducing bottles made from all-recycled PET (rPET). By using rPET instead of PET, Nestlé Waters’ products and other materials are converted into new bottles, gaining a second life. Nestlé Waters continues to explore how it can expand the use of rPET across its bottled water operations in California. All of these efforts build on recent announcements by Nestlé to conserve 144 million gallons of water each year beginning in 2016 in California, including at Nestlé Waters’ bottling operations across the state, and by developing a “zero water” milk factory in Modesto, California.