WOW! Since I wrote you on Monday, the Boycott Nestlé campaign has exploded in Southern Ontario, spread across Canada and lit up social media!
The CBC’s The National covered the story and interviewed Council of Canadians National Chairperson Maude Barlow. Check out the clip.
As of today, more than 20,000 people have already signed on! If you haven’t yet, please join the movement and support the community fight back.
And if you missed my email from last week, here it is again:
Dear Friend,
In the middle of a drought in southern Ontario, bottled water giant Nestlé continues to extract over four million litres of groundwater every day from an aquifer near Guelph.
Nestlé pays just $3.71 for every 1 million litres it pumps out of the ground, which it then ships out of the community in hundreds of millions of single-use plastic bottles for sale all over North America – at an astronomical mark up.
Between 2011 and 2015 the aquifer that supplies the main Nestlé production well dropped about 1.5 metres, while Nestlé’s water taking increased 33 per cent over the same period.
To make matter worse, Nestlé just bought another well in Middlebrook, Ontario – despite the local municipality’s attempt to purchase it to safeguard their municipal water supply.
Does that sound like a company you want to support?
Me neither. That's why the Council of Canadians has just launched a national campaign to encourage people to stop buying Nestlé bottled water and its other products.
Will you sign the Boycott Nestlé Pledge now?
Nestlé's greed doesn't end in Ontario. Its operations in British Columbia have also stirred up opposition from communities trying to protect their water. Despite the severe 2015 drought, Nestlé continues to extract 265 million litres from a well in Hope, B.C. located in Sto:lo Territory. The well connects to an aquifer that approximately 6,000 nearby residents in Hope rely on as their primary source of water.
And around the world, Nestlé is pumping water out of communities and reaping enormous profits.
Groundwater resources are finite. Droughts, climate change and over-extraction continue to impact our limited water sources. At this pace, we will not have enough for our future needs. So wasting our limited groundwater on frivolous and consumptive uses such as bottled water is madness.
Enough is enough. We must come together and support communities who are standing up and saying “no” to Nestlé’s water grabs and profit-making off of this precious shared resource.
I'm thrilled to report that more than 6,000 people have already signed the Boycott Nestlé Pledge! Will you add your name too?
If you’ve already taken the pledge, thank you! Please forward this on to your friends and family and encourage them to join you.
It is time to stop Nestlé from profiting from water.
Emma Lui
National Water Campaigner
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The Council of Canadians, 300-251 Bank Street, Ottawa, ON, K2P 1X3 |
