Nestlé pledges to use less water in Calif.
Technology will help plants save millions of gallons
The company that packages Arrowhead and Nestlé Pure Life drinking water will reduce the amount of water it uses at bottled-water plants and other factories in California, it has announced.
Nestlé will invest in technology to save water at plants that produce products ranging from condensed milk to ice cream and products for pets, the company said in a statement Tuesday. It did not detail how much it will spend.
It is working to convert a milk factory in Modesto, Calif., to a “zero water” plant that can extract all the water it needs from milk. A similar plant opened in Mexico last year, and Nestlé said it has invested about $7 million in the project in Modesto.
Nestlé said it also plans investments this year at its bottled-water plants in California and projects to reduce their water use by about 8% compared to last year.
“Like everyone else, we have to adapt, and so doing our part is really looking to how we can improve,” said Jane Lazgin, a spokeswoman for Nestlé Waters North America.
California is in the fourth year of a statewide drought but also has had below-average precipitation for eight years, except for 2011, according to weather records.
Statewide, Nestlé Waters has said it used about 705 million gallons of water from all sources in 2014. The company’s water use in the state has been growing along with its sales of bottled water.
Between 2011 and 2014, the company’s water use in California increased 19%, according to figures that Nestlé provided.
Nestlé and other bottled-water companies have faced growing criticism during the drought as some Californians have voiced concerns about the plants’ potential effects on local water supplies and spring-fed streams.
Nestlé SA, headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, is the world’s largest food company. Subsidiary Nestlé Waters is the world’s biggest bottled-water company and also the largest bottled-water producer in the United States.
The company runs five bottling plants in California — in Livermore, Los Angeles, Ontario and Sacramento as well as in Cabazon on the reservation of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians.
Nestlé bottles spring water drawn from 11 locations in the state and purified water pumped from municipal water supplies. The company said it has invested in projects in the past five years to cut water use and reuse water in its plants.
“We are focused on how to adapt our bottling and our manu- facturing operations, and our supply chain, to make them more resilient and more resistant to drought conditions,” José Lopez, Nestlé’s head of operations, said in the company’s statement.
Other planned investments are aimed at reducing water use at California factories that produce ice cream in Bakersfield and Tulare.
Nestlé announced the investments days after Starbucks said it will stop producing the bottledwater brand Ethos Water in California and instead move the bottling operation to Pennsylvania.
A total of 110 licensed bottledwater plants are operating in California, according to the state Department of Public Health.
The agency regulates the plants and collects information on water quality and the sources tapped. But no state agency is tracking exactly how much water that bottling plants or other industries are using or monitoring the effects on streams and local water supplies.
Mark Schlosberg, national organizing director for the advocacy group Food & Water Watch, said Nestlé’s plans to adjust its processes to save water don’t eliminate concerns about effects on water supplies.
“We’re calling for a moratorium on bottled water, their extraction in California,” Schlosberg said. “It’s bad for the environment for a wide range of reasons. It takes a large amount of water out of our ecosystems.”
Nestlé managers have said the company monitors its springs, adjusting the volume of water drawn in response to the amounts flowing into streams.
“To ensure our groundwater use is not more than is naturally sustainable, we only use water that naturally flows to the surface of our Arrowhead spring site,” the company said in a recent statement.