Nestlé donates $22,000 to the Township of Guelph/Eramosa for purpose of waste reduction

Jihee Park
Kelsey Rideout

The Township of Guelph/Eramosa last month received a $22,000 donation from Nestlé Waters Canada for the new Royal Distributing Athletic Performance Centre at Marden Park, in order to implement enhancements to the infrastructure of the facility and improve recycling performance.

“The purpose of these programs is to demonstrate the importance of public spaces recycling in helping government and industry achieve 85-90 per cent diversion rates for aluminum, glass, paper and plastic,” said John Challinor II, Director of Corporate Affairs for Nestlé Waters Canada.
According to Challinor, the company has committed to funding local initiatives that promote a culture of recycling, with a history of supporting programs in the province as well as nationally. Marden Park has been their most recent project.
“Our donations of public spaces infrastructure in Wellington County is helping local municipalities beautify their environments, obtain higher recycling rates for all recyclables (not just our own) and reduce their costs related to enhancing their recycling infrastructure in a meaningful way,” said Challinor. “We will be disappointed if the recycling rates in each of the entities in Wellington County where we have installed public spaces recycling infrastructure does not surpass 80 per cent in the short-term and 85 per cent and higher in the longer term.”
           

Nestlé Waters North America is the largest manufacturer of bottled water on the continent. Nestlé Waters Canada is the country’s biggest water bottling company, extracting and bottling 4.7 million liters of water everyday from Guelph’s Grand River watershed, which also serves as the area’s municipal source of water.

Resistance to the company’s extraction of such massive quantities of water has emerged over the years. Students who have been part of Tap In! have worked tirelessly to gain strides in their goal of making the University of Guelph a bottled water free campus. Wellington Water Watchers has been another major player on the front against the exploitation of local water sources.

Mike Nagy, Co-director of Wellington Water Watchers, clarified what the donation from Nestlé consisted of.

“[Nestlé] donated a number of bins to the facility, and basically put a value on it, so it’s a little different. There’s a bit of history on this. The township of Guelph-Eramosa declared the [Royal Distributing Athletic Performance Centre] a bottled water free facility, which inspired Nestle of course to meet with the township.”

It is difficult not to see any ironies in a major bottled water company donating bins to reduce waste. Nagy explained why he thinks Nestlé is drawn to making donations related to waste reduction.

“I’m not surprised because when I knew the policy of the bottled water happened, this is what Nestlé does, they try to convince otherwise…They don’t like policies like this because it obviously goes counter to their marketing program. We can’t tell Nestlé what to donate money to, that’s perfectly up to them. It’s up to people to accept it or not accept it. Nestlé has a vested interest in trying to keep the waste down. Their business is predicated on plastic waste. The more business they do, the more plastic waste is produced. That’s undeniable.”

Nagy emphasized the importance in primarily reducing waste. While recycling programs are necessary, they don’t actually cut down on the amount of garbage people put out.

“Waste per capita per head in Ontario has been increasing dramatically over the last 20 years, much faster than population growth. More and more products are becoming disposable and packing has increased. Water is one that is very easy to avoid. It comes out of your taps,” said Nagy.

While Nagy expressed that he doesn’t have any reservations with the donation itself, he did share his concern over the ongoing waste that comes from companies like Nestlé.

“[Nestlé] has a goal of getting the highest percentage as much of those bottles into the waste stream collection, regardless of if they are recycled or not because there are no stats,” said Nagy. “The province of Ontario does not keep any statistics whatsoever as to how many of these bottles are actually being recycled or not. It’s common knowledge that in the world generally the vast majority of the bottles are actually not being recycled.”

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