BlueTriton’s exit from Ontario shows the effectiveness of bottled water opposition movements

Adobe stock by Dmytro Panchenko.

BlueTriton — North America’s biggest bottled water firm — recently announced it will close Canada’s largest water bottling plant and its entire operations in Ontario.

While the company gave no reasons for the move, its retreat is a strong indication of the changing fortunes of the bottled water industry, both domestically and globally. It also illustrates the growing effectiveness of social movements that have challenged bottled water, weakening the industry’s sales.

As an environmental sociologist, my research explores social conflicts over water commodification. My current work focuses on bottled water and asks what its rapid growth means for the human right to water.

Bottled water is the world’s most-consumed packaged beverage. It has grown rapidly into a USD$340 billion global market led by major food and beverage corporations. However, bottled water also has a host of negative environmental and social impacts.

I am particularly interested in how the growth of the bottled water industry has generated diverse and surprisingly effective opposition movements.

These movements fall into two broad categories. On one hand are campaigns challenging the industry’s groundwater extraction in specific places. On the other are efforts to reduce the consumption of single-use bottled water and increase access to public tap water.

The exit from Ontario by BlueTriton — a private equity consortium that purchased Nestlé’s North American bottled water business in 2021 — is a clear victory for opponents that reflects the impact of both of these strands of opposition.

Opposing bottling

In 2000, the Swiss food and beverage giant Nestlé acquired a bottling plant in Aberfoyle, Ont. Included in the sale were two water wells and permits to extract 4.7 million litres of groundwater daily — the highest volume of water extraction rights of any bottler in the province.

In 2016, the firm bought another well that would have allowed it to expand to 6.2 million litres per day.

This part of Ontario is dependent on sub-surface groundwater for nearly all its water uses, including municipal water supply. Opposition to Nestlé’s water extraction operations emerged when the grassroots advocacy group Water Watchers was established in 2007 and expanded when Save Our Water was founded in 2015. Their efforts were supported by national organizations including the Council of Canadians.

Droughts in 2012 and 2016 highlighted tensions over the region’s finite groundwater.

While residential water use was curtailed, Nestlé continued to pump largely unrestricted. This contrast enabled Nestlé’s opponents to effectively leverage the issue of water scarcity — and the prospect of future drinking water shortages — in their efforts. Nestlé countered that its water-taking volume was insignificant relative to total groundwater use.

More recently, water advocates have collaborated with Indigenous activists and the traditional leadership of Six Nations of the Grand River Haudenosaunee First Nation. Only 17 per cent of residents on the Six Nations reserve are connected to safe drinking water, and two-thirds need to rely on packaged water. In this case, activists have framed Nestlé’s and BlueTriton’s water extraction as an issue of human rights, water injustice and land sovereignty.

These campaigns attracted significant media attention, which — against the backdrop of the 2016 drought — made water bottling into a volatile political issue at the provincial level. An opinion poll (sponsored by opponents) found that 64 per cent of Ontario residents across party lines favoured ending groundwater extraction for commercial bottling entirely. Even Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne criticized the industry in 2016.

The result was substantial policy change. Ontario’s government imposed a moratorium on new water-taking permits for commercial water bottlers and raised their extraction fees dramatically. These moves drew strong industry protest.

Even so, Doug Ford’s Conservative government extended the moratorium until 2021, when it announced a major groundwater policy revision. Among the reforms was a local veto over new large water-bottling operations, which doomed BlueTriton’s expansion to a third site.

Similar campaigns have also helped to stop water bottling by these companies elsewhere, including California and Oregon.

Reclaiming the tap

Meanwhile, another set of movements has challenged bottled water from the consumer end.

Initiatives to “reclaim the tap” involve municipalities, universities and other institutions banning bottled water sales on their premises. At the same time, activists have pressured local authorities to expand access to tap water by installing new filtered drinking fountains in public spaces, including airports.

This has taken place alongside efforts to educate the public about tap water quality.

These end-user strategies have also been energized by a growing awareness of the crisis of single-use plastic pollution. Roughly 600 billion single-use plastic beverage bottles are consumed and disposed of annually, of which packaged water represents the largest share.

Canada is the epicentre of this phenomenon. Since 2008, Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver and dozens of smaller communities have banned government purchases of bottled water and its sale on public property. Most have also installed refilling stations and promoted tap water consumption.

Hundreds of cities worldwide have followed suit. Similar policies have been passed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Munich and South Delhi, India.

Some of these efforts are co-ordinated internationally. For example, the Blue Communities Project links more than 80 municipalities in eight countries that have enacted such policies.

These initiatives have substantial reach. I estimate that nearly 14 million Canadians, and more than 200 million people worldwide, live in jurisdictions that have banned or restricted bottled water and expanded tap water access.

Moreover, fewer Canadians are buying single-use bottled water and 85 per cent of households now frequently use refillable bottles. These shifting patterns are stoking demand for convenient places to fill those bottles, and initiatives including Refill and Blue W help users find the nearest free refill points.

Stalling growth

The cumulative impact of these governmental policies and the refilling movement is becoming apparent.

After more than four decades of steady growth, the volume of bottled water consumed per person is now stagnant or falling across the Global North, including Canada, the United States, Germany, France and the European Union.

Worldwide, per-capita consumption of packaged water is projected to flatline in coming years.

Industry market analyses have expressed deep concern about this sea change. A Nestlé sustainability manager recently stated that:

“The water bottle has in some ways become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes. It’s socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me.”

These factors influenced Nestlé’s 2021 decision to sell its North American bottled water business to BlueTriton. Its CEO attributed the move to falling sales and environmental opposition.

Now, BlueTriton too appears to have scaled back in closing its Ontario operations, as it faces increased costs, heightened regulation, falling demand and an inability to expand. All of these adverse conditions are due at least in part to the efforts of opposition movements.

This move, and the industry’s flagging fortunes, provide strong evidence that organized opposition and the public backlash against single-use plastic bottled water are having a major impact.