“Pop Culture in a Bottle” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 255

tion, and the third-bestselling water brand overall, behind Aquafina and Dasani. Poland
Spring is the largest bottler in Maine and uses about 700 million gallons of water annu-
ally—enough to cover the Mall in Washington, DC , to a depth of six feet.
About thirty miles away from Poland Spring, in the town of Hollis, sits an enormous
industrial building in what used to be a potato field. Inside the gleaming half-million-
square-foot highly automated factory, seven bottling lines produce some 900 million
PET bottles a year and fill them with water directly from a spring. The water has been
filtered, treated with ultraviolet light, and inspected, remaining untouched by human
hands. This is the largest water-bottling plant in North America . It produces 65 million
cases a year. At the rear of the building are double-stacked pallets, loaded with 24 mil-
lion bottles—2.5-gallon jugs, half-liter and half-pint bottles, and eleven-ounce “Aqua-
pods” for kids—spread over six acres and extending eight feet high. This virtual sea per-
colated through the aquifer beneath the plant only a few days earlier and will soon be
trucked throughout the Northeast and replaced by the next plastic-encased virtual sea.
The plant processes water twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.
Poland Spring's advertising slogan is “What it means to be from Maine.” But as
the dimensions of the Hollis facility indicate, the company is no longer a homespun,
family-run operation. In 1980, Poland Spring was bankrupt when Perrier purchased it;
a dozen years later, Perrier and Poland Spring were taken over by Nestlé, the largest
food-products company in the world, based in Switzerland. Some Mainers welcomed
the multinational for the jobs it brought; others resented it as a greedy corporate inter-
loper.
“As oil is to Saudi Arabia, water is to Maine. And Nestlé wants to control it,” said
James Wilfong , a resident of Stow, near Poland Spring.
In December 2004, H 2 O for ME, a citizens' group led by Wilfong, questioned why
Poland Spring has the right to take state water without having to bid for it or pay much
for it. “We spent twenty-five years, and millions of dollars, cleaning up the groundwater
in this state,” said Wilfong. “I was part of that effort when I served in the legislature in
the seventies. We made sure every single underground gas tank in the state was dug up,
and polluted ground near aquifers was remediated. That took a lot of work, let me tell
you. And after all that, to say we citizens don't have an interest in our own water? I don't
think so.”
In 2004, H 2 O for ME launched an initiative to impose a first-in-the-nation
19.3-cents-per-gallon tax on the water that Poland Spring pumped. Based on the Alaska
Permanent Fund, which puts oil-extraction fees into a public trust, a portion of Maine's
water fees would be used to enhance the state's environmental protections, while a larger
percentage would be invested in small businesses, to grow the state economy. The idea
had nationwide—perhaps worldwide—implications. Over the winter of 2004, Wilfong