Australia -- Bottled water: Concerns aired at Beechworth public meeting

ALLAN THOMPSON, The Weekly Times
TEMPERS were tested when up to 200 people packed a public meeting in Beechworth last night to address growing community concern about the use of groundwater for bottled water in the area.

Organisers, Indigo, Alpine and Towong councils kept a tight rein on the meeting, keeping the question and answer section of the forum brief and to the point.
Even so, the depth of emotion was apparent as supporters and opponents of the bottled water industry strongly argued their case and, on one occasion, started talking over the top of each other.

Indigo Shire Council Mayor Jenny O’Connor said the bottled water industry had come out of “left field” and councils keep “hitting brick walls with legislation” trying to regulate it.
She believed the water should be kept at its source for agriculture and community use rather than used for bottled water while Alpine Mayor Ron Janas expressed concern on the impact and cost of the trucks used to transport water on local infrastructure. He described the water as “liquid gold” for some and said there were moral and ethical concerns over its use.

New Towong Mayor, Aaron Scales told the meeting he was worried about local amenity.
“We are trying to encourage people to move into our area and if that amenity is not there, then they won’t move,” he said.
However, Black Mount Spring Water owner Tim Carey, who extracts and trucks the local water to Asahi in Albury, defended the industry, saying only 0.1 per cent of water extracted from the ground in Australia was used for bottled water. The industry was legal and Goulburn Murray Water closely monitored the aquifers to ensure it was sustainable, he said. He gained support from a number of speakers in the audience who claimed tap water was a health risk due to the chlorine and fluoride added to it.
“We used to kill rabbits with fluoride,” one man told the crowd.
However, guest speaker Huw Kingston, who led the charge to make his hometown of Bundanoon in NSW the first in the world to become plastic bottle water free, said there were high levels of public health control over tap water and it was perfectly safe. He added bottled water often contained a percentage of tap water as well as the same chemicals.

He said despite the monitoring of the aquifers by authorities we didn’t really know what was happening underground. “We mess with aquifers at our peril,” he said. “They are a life-giving force. We have already messed up our rivers, let’s not do the same for our aquifers. There are too many unanswered questions.”