Consumer Advice

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/business/nestle-michigan-water.html

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Nestlé can pump more than 130 million gallons of water a year from a well near this northwestern Michigan town to bottle and sell. It’s a big business: Last year, for the first time, bottled water outsold carbonated soft drinks in the United States.

And now Nestlé wants more. It has applied to increase its pumping allowance at the well by 60 percent. The application, which the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is expected to rule on within months, has catalyzed opposition in part because of what Nestlé pays for most of the water it bottles: nothing. That is, it pays only a $200 annual permit fee to pump from wells it owns (like this one) or leases.

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The scale of Nestlé’s operation in this sparsely populated region about 180 miles northwest of Detroit is immense. The company packages an average of 4.8 million bottles of water a day — more than 3,000 a minute — with all lines running at a plant about 40 miles south of Evart, said David Sommer, the factory manager.