By Aaron Kesel
A group of concerned citizens has brought a 325-page class action lawsuit against Nestlé Waters North America, the company that owns Poland Spring, alleging that the Maine business has long deceived their customers by mislabeling common groundwater as “spring water,” Courthouse News reported.
The lawsuit
was filed in a Connecticut federal court on Tuesday accusing Nestlé
Waters North America Inc. of a “colossal fraud perpetrated against
American consumers.”
The civil suit was brought by 11 people who are seeking
millions of dollars in damages seeking whether the sources of Poland
Spring’s water meets the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) definition of a spring.
The suit alleges that the Poland Springs’ wells in Poland,
Maine, Hollis, Fryeburg, Denmark, Dallas Plantation, Pierce Pond
Township and Kingfield have never been scientifically proven to be
connected to a spring and draw in surface water, which cannot legally be
called spring water.
The suit further claims that Poland Springs has “politically
compromised” state regulators and interweaving its interests with those
of state government. “Rather than being collected from ‘pristine
mountain or forest springs as the images on those labels depict, Poland
Spring Water products all contain ordinary ground water that defendant
collects from wells it drilled in saturated plains or valleys where the
water table is within a few feet of the earth’s surface,’ the lawsuit
claims.”
What’s more, the group claims that the real spring dried up
fifty years ago adding that the source which Poland Spring gets their
water from “sites near waste and garbage dumps.”
In a statement to the publication, a Nestlé Waters
spokesperson stated that its water meets all relevant federal and state
regulations on the classification and collection of spring water and
that the suit is “an obvious attempt to manipulate the legal system for
personal gain.”
“The claims made in the lawsuit are without merit,” said a
spokesperson for Nestlé Waters. “Poland Spring is 100 percent spring
water.”
This isn’t the first time Nestlé Waters has faced
allegations that they were lying to customers selling fraudulent spring
water. In 2003, the company settled a class action lawsuit alleging
that Poland Spring water doesn’t come from a spring by agreeing to pay
$10 million in discounts to consumers and charity contributions.
In 2007, Aquafina, a competitor to Poland Spring ran by Pepsi Co, admitted that its own bottled water was not purified water or spring water, but simply plain old tap water.
While another competitor, Dasani, states on its website that
they maintain their bottled water comes from local water supplies and
is then filtered.
“We don’t believe that consumers are confused about the source of Dasani water,” Coca-Cola spokeswoman Diana Garza Ciarlante said. “The label clearly states that it is purified water.”
A group called Corporate Accountability International has
been pressuring bottled water sellers to stop their misleading marketing
practices for years. The group runs the “Think Outside the Bottle”
campaign which “promotes, protects and ensures public funding for our
public water systems and challenges the misleading marketing of the
bottled-water industry,” according to its website stopcorporateabuse.org.
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post and is Director of Content for Coinivore. Follow Aaron at Twitter and Steemit.This article is Creative Commons and can be republished in full with attribution. Like Activist Post on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, follow on Twitter and at Steemit.
