Opening the Floodgates and Draining the Great Lakes One Bottle at a Time: How Privatizing Water Resources Threatens the Great Lakes

Abstract

The Great Lakes are an enormous and precious source of fresh water on earth. Although water such as that in the Great Lakes has long been viewed as a public good, some private companies are seeing huge profits from bottling and selling water from the Great Lakes ecosystem. Concern about such privatization of water resources has resulted in a new interstate compact for the management of water resources in the Great Lakes Basin as well as an international agreement with Canada. Unfortunately, the new laws have a loophole that allows private companies to withdraw significant quantities of ground water and sell it as long as it is placed in containers holding 5.7 gallons or less. The individual states are handling the permitting of such withdrawals in accordance with their own state laws. Michigan now requires that withdrawals of more than 100,000 gallons of ground water per day be registered. Withdrawals of more than 250,000 gallons of ground water per day for the purpose of bottling as water requires a permit and such permits shall not be issued if the withdrawal will have an adverse impact. Unfortunately, not all states have the same program. Moreover, there are no provisions to require the evaluation of the cumulative impact of large withdrawals from multiple locations in the multiple states bordering the Great Lakes. In short, the laws for managing water resources are getting better, but there is still a long way to go to assure the environmental protection and sustainable use of the Great Lakes.