It’s the middle of the night and the roar of a massive truck echoes through the tiny village of Uki in northern New South Wales.
The prime mover, hauling large stainless-steel containers laden with groundwater, is headed north, down narrow country roads, to bottling plants across the border in Queensland.
In recent years, the number of water trucks moving through Uki has exploded as people buy up farmland across the shire of Tweed for its water allocation.
Bores, originally issued for irrigating crops or watering livestock, are being cheaply converted to commercial extraction permits, allowing land owners to extract millions of litres of groundwater a year for the booming $700m bottled water industry.
Pat Miller lives about 800km north of Sydney in the fertile northern rivers region of NSW and two years ago he joined the Tweed Water Alliance, a group fighting to stop groundwater being trucked out of their community.
Angry Tweed residents have compiled a dossier of complaints about water tankers operating day and night through the rural tropical fruit and sugar cane growing region.
Miller fears that while bores are now monitored, there isn’t enough data to predict how water extraction will affect aquifers in the long term. “There was a glitch in the environment plan in the Tweed shire that allowed this to happen in Uki, it allowed water extraction for bottling purposes,” Miller says.
“Then greed took over and now they are popping up like daisies all over the place.”
Across the nation, farming communities in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia say water mining has become big business and they fear for their future.
Much of the treated bore water is sold by big multinational companies such as Asahi and Coca-Cola Amatil for 2,000 times the cost of its tap equivalent.
Commercial water extractors maintain that their operations are a tiny proportion of groundwater use and that hydrogeological studies ensure the sustainability of aquifers.
But growers in rural communities are waging war against the industry and the loopholes letting it happen.
New South Wales
An hour south of Uki, farmers in Alstonville have a similar war cry. Members of the Save Alstonville Aquifer teamed up with their Uki neighbours on 3 March to rally against water mining.
NSW has more than 100,000 active and inactive bores, but just 5,400 of them are monitored, according to the NSW department of industry. “There have been no fines issued to date for exceeding groundwater licence extraction limits,” a department spokeswoman said.
Former Labor NSW agriculture minister Jack Hallam last September was approved to mine 24 million litres – roughly a dozen Olympic swimming pools – each year from a bore on his Uki property.
He says there is “a degree of alarmism” over the issue. “If you look at the ratio of environmental extraction and the requirements that are placed upon the operators, they are operating well within the limits of their licence,” Hallam says.
In February, NSW chief scientist Hugh Durrant-Whyte published the first part of an independent review of the impacts of the bottled water industry on groundwater in the northern rivers region.
It found that just 0.5% of water extraction was for bottling, with 220 megalitres a year taken for bottling compared with more than 43,000 megalitres a year for landholders, commercial and farming uses.
The report warned that data was patchy and did not exist in some areas and that scientists will now focus on scrutinising data and looking at the impacts of extraction for bottling.
For those in the Tweed shire, Vince Connell, council director of regulation says the council has applied to the state government to change planning laws, to ban water extraction for commercial bottling in the area. If a ban is put in place, the four existing commercial bottling bores won’t be affected.
Western Australia
Across the country, concerned farmers north of Perth in Western Australia have also created a campaign group, the Gingin Water Group.
Like their NSW counterparts, farmers there are upset that water is being trucked out of the shire for bottling.
Group chairman and Gingin farmer David Rickson says tankers run 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week removing millions of litres of water from surface sands adjacent to the Moondah/Gingin Brook.
“Ground water aquifers are decreasing and losing contact with larger parts of the wetland system,” Rickson says. “The fact the monitoring process of these bore fields is not transparent to the community leads to a perception the bottling industry may be detrimental to this area.”
Back in the city, farmers in the Perth hills fear for the future of their orchards as dams and bores run dry. Roleystone orchardist Cathy Chmielewski says her farm used to rely on dam water, but after the dam dried up she turned to bores. These too have run dry.
“My neighbour has a property that is directly opposite a bore used for taking the groundwater for bottles and her dam has dried too,” Chmielewski says.
Chmielewski grows stone fruit just 50m downhill from a bore owned by Coca-Cola Amatil. For the past 20 years, she says large tankers have visited the bore twice a day to fill up. The operation is licensed by the WA department of water to take 21 million litres of groundwater a year.
“You can’t take that much groundwater out and not affect the surrounding properties,” Chmielewski says.
Coca-Cola Amatil spokesman Patrick Low would not reveal where the company runs bores but insisted that they do not draw water from unsustainable aquifers and that they independently confirm the sustainability of all spring and mineral water sources.
“We do not run bores dry,” Low said. “We monitor all of the sites we extract water from, through hydrogeological surveys and rigorous site management plans.”
“For our part, where we do extract water, we are scrupulous in ensuring that the source is sustainable both for our use and for that of all other users of the same aquifer.”
Perth’s rainfall has been declining since the 1970s and in 2015 Curtin University scientists found that parts of the city are sinking by up to 4mm a year from groundwater extraction.
Conservation Council WA director Piers Verstegen says while aquifers can be sustainable, constantly drawing from a bore can cause a cone of depression and significantly impact those close to it.
Queensland
The 7,500 residents of Tamborine Mountain in Queensland rely exclusively on groundwater.
Here, water is extracted for bottled water brands including Mount Franklin and Neverfail, both owned by Coca-Cola Amatil. The local council has said it will no longer issue water extraction licences for commercial bottling.
Some Queensland residents fear that the region’s drying climate makes water extraction even harder to justify.
Victoria
About 300km northeast of Melbourne, in the apple and nut farming region of Victoria, the people of Stanley took their case against a water miner to court in August last year – and lost.
“We were the first community to take the issue as far as we could and an obscure interpretation of the water act by the Victorian Court of Appeal defeated us,” Stanley Rural Community Inc organiser Ed Tyrie says.
Stanley’s fight started in 2013 when the state water authority granted permission for the owner of water supply company Black Mount Spring Water to install a 60m-deep bore and extract 19ML of water a year from his Stanley Pastoral farm.
For four years, Stanley’s 400-plus residents fought to stop the planning department granting approval for infrastructure to store and transfer the water. They feared the water extraction would affect aquifers and food production.
But the problem for Stanley was section eight of the state water act.
It states that if a property has a water licence, other laws designed to protect the land and environment – such as town planning laws – cannot affect an owner’s ability to draw their water allocation.
“It’s effectively a loophole that no one had ever noticed before,” barrister Daniel Robinson says.
“I don’t think the water act was ever intended to have that effect on planning laws.
“It’s a loophole that leaves a hole in the planning process and it needs to be fixed.”
The loophole has left Stanley residents with a $90,000 legal bill and they are now battling to change the legislation.
Black Mount Natural Spring Water also operates in NSW, Brisbane and Perth. Owner Tim Carey claims the company only takes a fraction of the water available under its licences.
“Despite all the outcry with some of the local residents in Stanley, there is zero evidence of our water operations adversely affecting farming in the area,” Carey says.
Australian Beverages Council chief executive Geoff Parker says it is important for the bottle water industry to co-exist with their country neighbours and that everyone must ensure they are using water responsibly.
Federal water minister David Littleproud’s office did not respond to emails or calls from Guardian Australia on this issue.
