Nestlé Bottled Water Plant Attacked For Profiting Off Public Water During California Drought

A Nestlé bottled water plant has been inundated by protestors because they are bottling Sacramento municipal water and then selling it for a profit, all while the rest of California has been ravaged by a drought.

The Sacremento Bee have reported that a protest was held by the Crunch Nestle, a group that has previously gone to great lengths to protest the Nestle corporation’s attempts to profit by selling water from the area.

Just last month, their organizer, Bob Saunders, led a protest outside of the Nestle Waters North America plant, and he insisted that their actions are “extremely egregious.”

Nestle Waters North America plant buys water from Sacramento that it then uses to fill its bottles of Pure Life Purified Drinking Water. Meanwhile, Arrowhead Mountain Spring bottles are also filled with water from El Dorado, Tuolumne, and Napa.

The protestors are outraged at Nestle’s actions because they come while the whole state of California is embroiled in a drought that has severely reduced inhabitants’ use of water.

Saunders declared, “We’re in a drought and we find it extremely egregious for a company to be bottling water and being charged a pittance for it and selling it back to the public at 1,000 percent profit.”

Saunders explained that members of his protest are extremely worried at the amount of water that is used in Nestle’s hydraulic fracturing. He remarked that allowing Nestle to buy public water from a state that is currently plagued by drought to buy water, bottle it, and then resell it for profit “doesn’t make any sense, because water is such a needed commodity.”

“It’s ridiculous to allow that kind of thing to go during a drought,” he continued. “We need to relook at our usage of water and rethink how we do things in a new way, because our old system isn’t working.”

Nestle’s Pure Life Purified Drinking Water has been bottled at Sacramento’s plant since 2010, but Jane Lazgin, a spokeswoman for the company, insists that Nestle’s water usage “amounts to less than two-thousandths of 1 percent of the city’s annual water usage.” Nestle insist that they bought 50 million gallons of water from Sacramento in 2014, while officials added that they don’t receive a special rate.

Nestle have also revealed that around 80 percent of their products which originate in California are then sold in California too. This hasn’t acquiesced Crunch Nestle though, as they revealed that they plan on protesting the plant again in June.

[Image via Your Newswire]