Half of leading bottled-water brands source their product from drought-stricken California, a fact that has media and consumer groups up in arms. It doesn’t help matters that the process by which companies gain access to public water sources in California is fairly opaque, or that the state keeps no record of how much groundwater the “spring water” bottlers – Arrowhead (owned by Nestle), Ethos (owned by Starbucks), Refreshe (Safeway) and Crystal Geyser – use. To make matters worse, new groundwater management regulations won’t change that until 2020.

The news that many bottlers operating in California’s national forests are doing so with long-expired permits has only added fuel to the fire.

An investigation by the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, California, revealed earlier this month that Nestle has been piping water out of Southern California’s San Bernardino National Forest under a permit that expired in 1988. The paper found that Nestle’s was one of dozens of similarly expired permits.

In response, Tim Brown, chairman, president and CEO of Nestle Waters North America, responded with an opinion piece in the San Bernardino Sun defending his company’s practices and noting that, under federal law, Nestle’s national forest permit is valid until deemed otherwise.

Brown also equated Nestle’s use of California water – 705m gallons a year, bottled at five plants across the state – to the average annual watering needs of two California golf courses.

For water rights advocates, though, there are broader implications. “It highlights a bigger policy problem: the state doesn’t track groundwater,” said Adam Scow, of water rights nonprofit Food and Water Watch.

Scow added that pumping groundwater has a bigger impact in some parts of the state than others, an impact that is inadequately measured by simply comparing the number of gallons used for bottled water to the number of gallons used for other purposes in the state.

“If Nestle continues to pump in Southern California at high rates, during a drought, when it’s not being recharged, it will be over-drafting that groundwater source,” Scow said. “And that’s a big problem when you’ve got wells going dry and people in the state without access to clean drinking water.”

Piping without permits

The problems with granting private access to public water go beyond Nestle’s national forest permit, according to Peter Gleick, executive director of nonprofit water research organization Pacific Institute.

“If society is going to bother regulating and protecting public water and public lands by issuing permits limiting and managing water use, they should do it right,” said Gleick, who authored a book about the problem with Americans’ fondness for bottled water. “Paper permits are worthless when it comes to protecting the public interest.”

San Bernardino National Forest Supervisor Jody Noiron has said that reviewing Nestle’s permit – as well as other water permits in the forest – is now a top priority.

Sounding every bit the overloaded and underfunded government employee, Noiron told various media outlets that she had not realized the permit had expired so long ago, and that the issue would now move to the top of the pile. She has also said that various environmental laws were not yet on the books in the 1970s, when Arrowhead first applied for the permit that Nestle now holds. The permit will now need to be updated with respect to those laws, which could take anywhere from 18 months to more than two years, she added.

Even if the review is updated to comply with current laws, though, it might still fail to address the concerns of water rights activists.

“We have to ask the bigger question: is this a reasonable and beneficial use of public water?” Scow said. “Of course it’s not.”

No one knows what’s in the well

There’s also the issue of water use transparency, which is murky at best. Local permitting agencies tend to look only at the immediate environmental impact of a groundwater pipeline or bottling facility, while the state water board monitors only the quality of bottled water.

No agencies currently track what’s available in groundwater aquifers, or how much is being pumped out of them.

A prime example of the fallout is the Safeway-Lucerne bottling plant in Merced, California. The plant bottles water both for Safeway stores and for Starbucks’ Ethos water – the sales of which, ironically, generates donations for international water charities.

Using groundwater from the Merced area for Safeway and groundwater from a private spring at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas for Ethos, the plant draws from two areas described by the US National Drought Mitigation Center as being in “exceptional drought”.

But no information is publicly available as to how much groundwater is being used or how much is available in the aquifers. In fact, due to the state’s historic mismanagement of groundwater, those details may not be known.

Scow said he hopes the current attention around what he called “the most egregious misuses of public water” – bottled water, fracking, and corporate agriculture growing water-hungry crops in the driest parts of the state – will encourage California Governor Jerry Brown to take a more aggressive position.

“The state has all the power it needs to manage groundwater right now,” Scow said. “I don’t expect Nestle to voluntarily stop making money bottling water. That’s why we have government. We just need them to step up and govern.”

Unnecessary luxury in a drought

Bottlers have also argued that while Americans consume about 10bn gallons of bottled water a year, California alone uses 38bn gallons a day.

Still, there are significant energy and material wastes inherent in the product. Only 38% of plastic bottles are recycled, and it takes about 1.6 liters of water to package and transport every liter, not to mention the energy costs. In a drought situation, Gleick said, every use of water needs to be re-examined.

“The drought raises awareness of all water issues and offers an opportunity to look more carefully at every water-using sector of our economy, including bottled water,” he said. “Ultimately, in the US and most developed nations, bottled water is a luxury, not a necessity. When drought forces us to look at all water uses, the first things to challenge are unnecessary luxuries.”