NEW ZEALAND – A plan to extract millions of litres of water out of a Unesco world heritage site, send it by pipe to the coast and ship it to foreign markets for bottling has ignited a campaign over water resources in New Zealand.

An export company is proposing to collect 800 million litres a month of the “untapped” glacial waters of Lake Greaney and Lake Minim Mere, mountainous dams that are fed by rainfall on the Southern Alps.

The pristine water, which the company Alpine Pure calls “untouched by man” would be pumped 20km downhill through an underground pipeline to a reservoir at Jackson Bay on the West Coast, where it would be processed.

From there, it would travel through a two-kilometre pipeline laid on the seafloor to a mooring, where 100,000-tonne tanker ships would be waiting to transport it in bulk to overseas markets in China, India and the Middle East.

The company already has permission to extract the water and is going through the process of getting resource consent from the Westland District Council for the pipeline.

Green groups are calling on the government to urgently step in and protect the nation’s freshwater springs and lakes, although Alpine Pure claims it is only taking a fraction of the water that falls as rain on the Southern Alps.

“We’ve had a lot of interest in this proposal from overseas companies,” said Bruce Nisbet, managing director.

“Pristine water has been falling on the Southern Alps for a million years, and it would usually be wasted by flowing directly out to sea. The amount we want to take is very small.”

But the plan has angered environmentalists who warn New Zealand is giving away its most precious natural resource for free, at a time when domestic water supplies are increasingly subject to contamination scares.

Two weeks ago a petition signed by 15,000 people was delivered to parliament calling for an immediate halt to bottled water exports.

It comes amid growing anger that multinational companies such as Coca-Cola are drawing millions of litres of water from ancient underground aquifers for next to nothing.

The company, which has an annual revenue of over $60 billion, last year paid NZ$40,000 to the local council for the right to extract up to 200 cubic metres of water a day.

The majority of New Zealand’s bottled water is drawn from Blue Spring in Putaruru, where Coca-Cola Amatil has a bottling factory.

The spring is world-renowned for its colour and clarity, and is classified as a natural taonga, or treasure.

Although Blue Spring is the major supplier of New Zealand’s bottled water industry, companies are now looking to more remote parts of New Zealand to access untainted water supplies, hence the push to access glacial water from Lake Greaney and Lake Minim Mere on the edge of the Mount Aspiring National Park.

Currently, century-old legislation stipulates that no-one owns New Zealand’s water, with individuals and companies alike only paying a nominal fee to councils for the infrastructure associated with extracting and processing it.

However, after a series of contamination scares in the North Island last year – one of which resulted in thousands of residents falling violently ill with gastroenteritis as a result of animal faeces entering the water – Kiwis are growing increasingly concerned that their freshwater reserves are being exploited by corporate multinationals, while they are forced to boil or buy back their water, at a cost of around NZ$3 a litre.

Jen Branje, the founder of protest group Bung the Bore which initiated the petition to parliament, said the government must halt the practice.

“We want a ban on all bottled water exports until we have legislation in place to protect this resource.

“Currently it is being given away willy-nilly for free and it is depleting our own reserves and that shouldn’t be happening.”

According to government figures, New Zealand’s annual freshwater resource is 500 trillion litres, of which two per cent, or 10 trillion litres, is extracted.

As of May 2016, 71 consents have been granted in New Zealand for “the taking of water for bottling”, a spokesman for the ministry for the environment said.

Catherine Delahunty, the Green party’s spokesperson for water, said that her party and the Labour opposition were pushing for companies to be charged for exporting New Zealand water.

“We are handing over this precious, finite resource and it is disappearing offshore. And that is really upsetting for Kiwis who have seen the increasing water degradation of their own supplies over the last 20 years,” she said.

Prime minister Bill English has now announced the government would ask an expert water panel to investigate whether water destined for overseas exports should be charged, after mounting public pressure.

“We do accept there’s growing public concern about it, that’s why we want to refer it off to this group to look at what if any reasonable options there are,” he said.

- The Guardian