Regular readers know about what's happening at Sunny Slope Farm in Alton, where NH2o, the unique high-quality spring water is bottled.
In addition to their current fiscal crisis, the owners are dealing with some legal efforts to ban plastic water bottles - it sounds like a good idea, in terms of reducing litter, until you hear the whole story. Here it is, as written by Deanna Chamberlain, one of the company's owners. (We've taken the unusual approach here of simply posting an email she sent to one of her supporters... You can find out more or contact her through the info listed below.
- RC, editor)
Hi Elizabeth,
Thanks so much for your quick reply.
Yes, it is a battle we have been fighting for a long time.
Programs like this inform me of the concerns that are out there, and of how much misinformation is out there that folks take for truth. That is why I try every chance I get to educate folks about the difference between reverse osmosis water & Spring Water, and about the fact that PET (plastic) is one of the most recyclable products on the planet (it has zero artifact and it is an elastomer polymer and can be melted & re-used ad infinitum, as new bottles, or rugs, drapes, pens, bags or even clothing ~ check out EarthTec in Portsmouth), and has nothing to off-gas into the water(no BPA, no hormones, no dioxins, nada).
Folks who are outraged about the number of water bottles in the landfills should check the facts, because the majority of the plastic bottles you will find in those land-fills are for soda and juices. And anyone who becomes outraged about (any) bottles going into the land-fill should be outraged at our country citizens’ increasingly lazy habit of not walking across their own kitchen floor to their own recycle bin and putting the bottle (any bottle) in it.
We should have more recycling bins everywhere. On the streets, in stores & in public restrooms, anywhere & everywhere we throw things away. What we need is a bigger push on recycling, not trying to eliminate one of the most recyclable products on the planet!
I have links to quite a bit of this information on our website on both the Science Page and on the Links & Locations Page. Please invite any of your customers who might be concerned to visit NH2o Spring Water for more information.
Really, in this instance, the only thing to fear is fear itself. In fact this movement reminds me a great deal of Prohibition, only it is against a product that is healthy for you, not harmful, and which uses the same containers as a myriad of other products on the shelves, but is being singled out (which is where Prohibition started, actually ~ with banning hard liquor ~ but, as these things always do, it progressed to eventually include all intoxicating liquors, including some medicines & even products with trace amounts of alcohol in them).
Another thing that Jill & Kate do not take into account when they suggest banning bottled water is the fact thatbottled water companies perform a huge public service that we literally cannot live without. If there are no bottled water companies (which is the end result when you extrapolate out the consequences of this sort of action) then there is no one in place to provide life-sustaining water during a crisis. You can ask anyone in Haiti or New Orleans (or even in Sanbornville, NH after their boil water order) how they feel about banning bottled water and they will almost certainly look at you as if you are cross-eyed.
We live in a free market system here in the United States (emphasis on free), and if people do not want bottled water they can vote with their dollars.
Deciding who should live or die as a company or an industry because you have an opinion about their product is like saying that all candy manufacturers should be shut down because their product causes obesity or cavities or diabetes, (all things that Spring Water, even ordinary bottled water, not only don’t do, incidentally, but actually help prevent).
Large groundwater extractions of Spring Water take less than 1% of the water permitted by large groundwater extraction permits in the state of NH. We have a permit for 223,222 gallons per day, which is still less than golf courses use more to water their lawns (allowing that water now loaded with fertilizers & chemicals to go back into the aquifer), but as a small bottler we have taken approximately 27,000 gallons for the process of & the actual bottling of Spring Water since we began bottling in November of 2009.
Saying that we as a small Spring Water company are creating a situation where folks are so much less likely to use their tap water is not realistic. The only thing that makes folks less likely to use their tap water is if their tap water is not good. And, believe me, people who have good tap water are proud of that fact and will only buy bottled water when the situation dictates that it is more convenient for them to do so. People who do nothave good tap water (and there are many more of those folks in the state of NH than you think ~ I hear it all the time at events & farmers’ markets) know the value of being able to buy good, fresh, clean & tested water. It is irreplaceable.
And, whether Jill & Kate believe it or not, we as a species are making it harder & harder to find that good, clean, un-messed with Spring Water; every day we destroy another aquifer or water source with our trashy ways. They say that the water bottling companies try to scare people into buying bottled water. I actually haven’t seen that marketing campaign, but I can tell you that if you are in this business the evidence is mounting every day that people should be scared. The people who want to ban bottled water are raising their fists against the symptom, not the problem. The problem is our own bad habits and our species’ desire to stick our heads in the sand & deny the consequences of our past actions. If they want to fight for clean water for the public, they should be saying Thank the Lord there is someone out there guarding the resources, and start putting their energy and funding into solving the global issue of increasing contamination & ruination of our public water sources.
The Spring Water companies guard their source, take care of it like a baby, keep the constant threats away from the water. I don’t think there are many home-owners who have any notion of doing that, no less the ability to do it. In fact, they are often unwittingly adding to their own well’s pollution by doing stuff like pouring pharmaceuticals down the toilet, or allowing oils and other contaminating liquids to spill on their driveways or in their yard, or continuing to use copper pipes when their pH is too aggressive.
The NH DES told us after one $50,000/22 day pump test that they learned something from that test that they didn’t know before we conducted it about the bedrock wells (and probably springs) in NH. We had to monitor our neighbors while we were doing that test, some of them as much as 4 miles away, and what they learned by looking at those monitoring results is that the heavy metals like lead & arsenic, radon & iron are coming & going in NH’s bedrock wells are coming & going willy nilly.
After they told us that, we added an arsenic filter to the design of our skid (storage tank) where the media alone costs over $1600, and added an iron filter as well (cost over $4000), even though our analytics did not show that we had an issue with either. Better safe than sorry.
Few home-owners even know about this issue. Believe me, I talk to a lot of people at the farmers’ markets I work, and most people do not have this information, and if they have any concerns about their water at all, they think their little Britta is protecting them ~ it is not ~ not from pharmaceuticals, not from high pH scouring the copper out of the pipes into their water, not from a spur of lead wandering through.
If you think that Spring Water is a public resource and should be free to everyone, then here is the way to do that: everyone needs to drill a well and access the water they have, if they have it on their land. Then they can access the water on their land “for free”, just as the water company did.
If you think that the water should be no cost to everyone ever (which is the logical conclusion of Kate & Jill’s hypothesis), then the government needs to come and pay for each one of those wells, or if people are getting their water from a public source, that source needs to stop sending a monthly water bill & all of their workers need to become government employees, because there will be no funds to pay the people who work at that public source anymore, no less money to test the source or to treat it if an issue arises. Just as is true for a water company.
If you think that the water that is being harvested on the land that belongs to a water company (in our case, to our family who have been the stewards of this land for 75 years) should be free to everyone, then the government, or a group of concerned citizens, need to pay for the wells to access that water, and, of course, the testing and engineering to access the water in the first place, and then to determine its quality, and also to determine if it is Spring Water or not (because Spring Water is the best water we can drink; the way God made water in the first place to best sustain our blood & bodies, before we started messing around with it and making “plastic water”).
If you think the public should just be able to come and take the water from the company that spent the $1.1 million to find & access the Spring Water (which our company and many others like us basically give away to many folks already, incidentally), then you need to be ready for your neighbor to come over to your land and start taking your water from your well (especially if they don’t have enough access to water on their land for them to be able to create a well), because you have just, in essence said that all the water should be freely available to everyone ~ property rights become null & void. Whether the right to take that water currently belongs to a company who owns that land and that spent $1.1 million just getting the piece of paper to access that precious water, or to the guy down the street who spent $3000 to drill a well and got 9 gallons per minute, each would be subject to having to share their water for free, no matter how much money & effort they put into accessing and harvesting that water, if you extrapolate out the thinking behind Jill & Kate’s reasoning.
We are all passing through. The Spring Water doesn’t “belong” to us anymore than the land does, any more than your home or your land or your water belongs to you. But while you are here, if you have put your fortune and your energy into “owning” a home, or “owning” some land, or owning that well you paid for, in this country you don’t expect someone to be able to claim the right to its comfort or resources without recompensing you.Our small Spring Water company on our family farm has taken on the awesome, expensive and never-ending responsibility of being stewards of the precious jewel of the Spring Water on our land. Our father who grew up on Sunny Slope (the Chamberlains have been in Alton since 1770), believed that if we harvested the Spring Water and shared it with our community it would be a clean, quiet, non-invasive way to sustain our farm for generations to come. I hope he was right because we have put everything into this endeavor, and we do not make a lot of money from it.
We all get to live here for a while & we get to partake in the blessing of the resources God provided to sustain us while we are here, (physically or financially, which eventually comes down to physically, doesn’t it?), whether we are harvesting water or beets. We all sustain each other; we take a risk, we risk everything and we create something that we can share with the community and the community rewards us by giving us something they have created in exchange ~ mastodon meat or dollar bills, it’s all the same in the end ~ so that we too can survive. We do not expect the farmers to spend blood & tears to raise food and yet let them starve themselves for want of reimbursement for the materials & time they expended. Why would anyone think it fair & right to ask that of any one, even of a company, who is just, in the end a bunch of folks trying to sustain themselves using whatever resources are provided by providing a service of product to the rest of the community.We are all worthy of being sustained for our efforts.
Thanks,
Deanna
Chamberlain Springs LLC
Sunny Slope Farm /118 Old Wolfeboro Rd.
Alton, NH 03809
603-875-7562 home-office / / 603-387-3889 cell
