U.S. Water News Online
POLAND SPRING, Maine (AP editorial) -- The way Thomas Sobol describes it, you'd expect to find Poland Spring a scummy puddle teeming with mosquito larvae.
The original source of America's best-selling bottled spring water ``is stagnant and no longer flows,'' according to court papers filed by Sobol and several other attorneys. Their complaint goes on to argue that the groundwater which once fed the spring, and still provides a significant fraction of Poland Spring water, has been contaminated by sewage and a garbage dump.
Yet visitors to the Poland Spring Museum and Spring House can peer into a limpid pool that looks like it could slake a Saharan thirst.
So what to make of Michelle Savalle and SDB Trucking v. Nestle Waters, the widely publicized class action lawsuit that Sobol and his colleagues filed in July? Are these attorneys a band of valiant servants to the public good taking on a cynical corporation? Or are they a bunch of greedy lawyers interested in nothing more than a big pay day?
Wherever the truth lies, the suit offers a fascinating glimpse at how Nestle, which owns Poland Spring, and other companies have turned ordinary water into an almost mystical entity and reaped billions in the process.
``There is no truth to these allegations,'' says Kim Jeffrey, President and CEO of Poland Spring. Sobol and his fellow attorneys are the ones doing the deceiving and misleading, Nestle officials insist. On truthaboutpolandspring.com, a Web site Nestle set up in response to the suit, the company bemoans the proliferation of tort lawyers and class-action claims.
``As a company with a product that is in great demand, we've become a target for lawyers who make their living suing people,'' the site complains.
There is no doubt of the galloping demand for bottled water. This year bottled water is expected to surpass coffee, beer and milk to become the second most consumed beverage in the United States, behind only soft drinks. If current trends continue, says Michael C. Bellas, chairman and CEO of the Beverage Marketing Corp., bottled water will eclipse even soda by 2020.
``I've never seen a beverage phenomenon like bottled water,'' he says.
Places like Poland Spring play an integral role in the water business. With down-home brand names, labels depicting idyllic landscapes and slogans touting purity and harmony with nature, multinational corporations try to evoke images of nature unspoiled.
That's why Nestle goes to the trouble of buying and developing springs from coast to coast and marketing them under different labels. Poland Spring sells mostly in New England and the urban Northeast; Florida gets Zephyrhills. California has Arrowhead; the Midwest, Ice Mountain. Texans and their neighbors know Nestle water as Ozarka. Altogether, Nestle has 75 U.S. bottled water brands.
Nestle capitalizes on the Poland Spring location with the slogan ``What it Means to be from Maine.'' But what DOES it mean?
``Most places in Maine where you put in a well you'll end up with good water quality,'' says Maine State Geologist Robert Marvinney.
Poland Spring is one of those places. So are Clear Spring and Evergreen Spring, both about 30 miles away, and Garden Spring, eight miles away. Nestle names all three springs as sources of Poland Spring water.
The lawsuit charges that many of the features Nestle calls springs are really manmade excavations, created by backhoes that dug down until they reached the water table.
If you want to put a label on the bottle that says ``spring water,'' federal regulations specifically require -- among other things -- that ``there shall be a natural force causing the water to flow to the surface through a natural orifice.''
The springs associated by Nestle with some of its Maine wells are not the idyllic pools that come to mind when the company talks about ``pristine sources'' and ``earth's most precious resources.''
Some of them are downright unsightly, stagnant puddles surrounded by boggy ground in areas rife with mosquitoes and deer flies. And as the lawsuit states, some of them are adjacent to parking lots.
The notion that a single drop of Poland Spring comes from these filthy puddles would give the marketing people fits. But no Poland Spring water actually comes from them, of course. No Poland Spring water actually comes from Poland Spring itself, for that matter, or any other spring. Nestle pumps Poland Spring water out of the ground through wells scattered all over southern Maine.
It's OK to put the Poland Spring label on that water, company officials say. Federal regulations allow a bottler to pump water from wells and label it ``spring water'' as long as a few conditions are met. The wells must tap the same formation that feeds a spring named on the bottle, and the wells must produce water indistinguishable from what comes out of the ground naturally.
Poland Spring meets those requirements, Nestle's Kristen Tardif says. What's more, she adds, collecting water through wells rather than piping it from natural springs is better because it reaches down into the earth to capture upwelling water. If you collect water from a surface spring there is a chance it will be contaminated between the time it flows out of the ground and into the bottle.
Nestle is simply collecting spring water before it gets to the spring, Tardif explains.
Nonsense, counters Bill Miller, president of the National Spring Water Association. Miller formed the organization, whose members are mostly small bottlers, during the 1990s. At the time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was developing the regulations that govern the spring water industry today.
The chances that water pumped out of a well would otherwise have flowed through the ground to emerge from a particular spring nearby are slim, says Miller, who operates a spring in North Carolina. So how can you slap a label that says Poland Spring on a bottle of water that was actually pumped out of the ground more than a mile away?
A few years ago, a landowner like Miller could turn a spring into a nice little business with an investment of a few hundred thousand dollars. Now Nestle and other large corporations are running the little guys out of business with highly efficient bottling plants, massive distribution networks and enormous sales volume.
``The whole competitive landscape has changed tremendously,'' says Nestle director of corporate communications Jane Lazgin.
Those economic shifts may have at least as much to do with the class action suit as the quality of Poland Spring water.
It seems several attorneys representing small New England bottlers recently approached Nestle wanting to discuss trends in the business. The attorneys were trying to find a mutually acceptable way for their clients to coexist with Nestle in the new competitive landscape. And depending on whom you ask, these attorneys may also have been representing consumers harmed by Nestle's alleged misrepresentation of Poland Spring's origins.
The negotiations were going well, says Jan Schlichtmann, one of the attorneys. Nestle was willing to concede that it has experienced growing pains as its business has expanded. During the mid-1990s, for example, Poland Spring was afflicted with a spate of customer complaints about funny-smelling water. Tests showed that the water had unusually high levels of bacteria not harmful to humans.
The odor problem was caused by a poorly maintained carbon filtration unit in the plant, they say, not contamination of the source. The carbon unit was replaced years ago, and the customer complaints stopped.
The company has also had problems with state regulators in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But those issues were mostly technical and have been ironed out, Lazgin explains.
``We were working towards some ideas that could resolve these disputes,'' Schlichtmann says.
But that resolution never came, he complains, because Sobol and a few of his compatriots decided they could make more money by abandoning the negotiations and filing the class-action lawsuit.
The way Sobol tells it, Schlichtmann was about to reach an agreement with Nestle that benefited only the bottlers, leaving consumers out of the equation.
Nestle offers yet another variation on the story. At the end of 2002, Lazgin says, they were approached by a group of attorneys representing ``some unnamed competitors.''
``There were two, maybe three, opportunities for us to refute their claims,'' she says, and then in July things fell apart.
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