Peckenham quoted in Sun Journal article on growth of bottled water in Maine
John Peckenham, director of the Maine Water Research Institute and the associate director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine, was quoted in a Sun Journal article on the growth of bottled water in the state. “You just go west of the Mississippi and water is just what everybody talks about and it’s very, very political. Agriculture and cities are all dependent on a very limited resource,” Peckenham said. “In our part of the world, we actually have a massive surplus of fresh water. If you want to think of it as a commodity, we have far more than we can use. So the issues as I see them really come down to, ‘Where is the water that’s suitable and meets the definition of spring water so that we can bottle it in sufficient quantities to make a profit in the marketplace?’ If you looked at it on whole, across the whole state, we can’t even measure what fraction goes out in bottles compared to everything else. But all problems are local problems. You start going on a smaller and smaller scale, are people being affected? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”