water

crumpled 500 ml plastic water bottle with a blue label identifying it as "Big 8" brand, lying amid stones, fallen leaves, grass and a fir branch

This is the second of a two-part series looking at two commercial groundwater wells in Colchester County – one owned by the Sobeys company Big 8 Beverages, and the other by Canadian Springs, owned by Aquaterra. This article examines some of the environmental implications of such commercial water bottling, when the planet is experiencing not just a climate crisis, but also a plastic pollution crisis. This article was originally published by the Halifax Examiner, and the first article in this series is available here.

In June 2013, the year the Sobeys company, Big 8 Beverages, received a grant of nearly half a million dollars from the Nova Scotia government, it installed equipment in its Stellarton facility that allowed the company to produce its own bottles and to “significantly reduce” its costs.

Two years later, Big 8 won Invest Nova Scotia’s “export achievement award.” To honour the occasion, Invest Nova Scotia put together a promotional video for the company, which features narration from Brad Bethell, Big 8 general manager.

The face of a clean-shaven man with short-cropped brown hair and blue eyes in the foreground, with a large plastic bottle of water with a blue tint and cap behind him, and under his face, a blue circle logo with three curved lines inside it, and the words 'Brad Bethell, General Manager" in a blue banner across the bottom of the screenshot, taken from a video.

Screenshot from Invest Nova Scotia video featuring 2015 Export Achievement Award Winner: Big 8 Beverages, owned by Sobeys, showing its general manager, Brad Bethell.

In the video, Bethell said:

Essentially, we can bottle a 500 ml bottle of water inline from a pre-form all the way through to palletizing it without touching it, so it’s very efficient, very effective, and we actually produce over 250,000 single bottles a day.

You really have to understand your market that you’re operating in now, your domestic market, and make sure you’re one of the best. And then once you know the business model, the cost, the logistics, we work with NSBI [Nova Scotia Business Inc.] to make some great contacts to help educate ourselves, on what we need to do to be competitive, and to get into the export trade.

A man wearing a baseball cap and glasses stands in the middle of a U-shaped assemblyline full of plastic bottles full of orange pop with labels identifying it in navy blue lettering as Big 8.

Still showing the Big 8 bottling plant in Stellarton, taken from the Invest Nova Scotia video promoting 2015 Export Achievement Award Winner: Big 8 Beverages.

Invest Nova Scotia also did a Q and A with Julie Nowe, Big 8’s finance and business development manager. Nowe said the “cost reduction” Big8 was able to make by producing its own bottles, and the bottling plant in Stellarton being close to the port of Halifax, positioned Big 8 for exporting “top-quality Canadian bottled spring water or soft drinks.”

“Now we’re exporting to China, Barbados, and Aruba, and we’re looking at further development in Asia and some Middle Eastern countries,” said Nowe.

“We have a niche here because of our excellent water source. We acquire our water from an underground aquifer in Valley, Nova Scotia, which is one of the purest aquifers in Canada,” Nowe noted.

As reported in Part 1 of this series, the two corporations extracting water in Colchester County for bottling are Empire Company that owns Sobeys, which in turn owns Big 8 Beverages, and Primo Water Corporation that owns Aquaterra, which in turn owns Canadian Springs.

According to Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change (NSECC), Sobeys has a water withdrawal permit that allows it to withdraw 650,000 litres a day, which works out to 2.4 billion litres a year. For this, it pays the provincial government $360.27 annually. Aquaterra can withdraw 961,000 litres a day, or 3.6 billion litres a year, for which it pays $408.58 annually. Continue reading Nova Scotia is practically giving away ‘some of the purest water in Canada’

Part 2. What are the environmental costs of bottling and exporting Nova Scotia's groundwater?

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This is the third in a series of four articles on the 21st-century push for mining and quarrying in Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Earlier versions of articles in this series appeared in May and June 2018 in the Halifax Examiner and the Cape Breton Spectator(I am pleased to say that this series of four articles has been shortlisted for an Atlantic Journalism Award in Excellence in Digital Journalism: Enterprise/Longform.)

Part 3. Gold in the hills or clean water in the rivers? Citizens take on government geologists in northern Nova Scotia

Article 3 photo SuNNS no mining sign

The news broke in November 2017 on the front page of the free monthly community paper, The Tatamagouche Light, in an article written by Raissa Tetanish under the headline “Gold in the hills?”

“The hills” are the Eastern Cobequid Highlands in northern Nova Scotia, a mostly forested area of 30,000 hectares (74,132 acres), stretching from the Wentworth ski hill to Earltown.[1]

Tetanish reported that, not only did geologists from the provincial Department of Natural Resources (DNR) think there was gold in the Cobequid Hills, they had been prospecting there for six years. And now, reported Tetanish, DNR was preparing to invite mining companies from around the world to come and do more advanced exploration.

Screenshot taken from DNR geological map showing enclosure area slated for gold exploration in the Cobequid Highlands in Nova Scotia.

In 2016, the government had closed the area to any other prospecting while DNR geologists did their own hunting for gold. About half the enclosure area was the French River watershed, which supplies the village of Tatamagouche its drinking water. Concerns about the water supply aside, the geologists were “enthused” by what they’d found and “optimistic for the future,” reported Tetanish.

The article explained that there were plans to hold an “open house” to inform citizens about the findings, and the geologists said they would be promoting the “opportunity” at the next Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention, which would be held in Toronto in March 2018. After that there “could be a Request for Proposals (RFP) to see if there’s interest from mining companies.”

Garth DeMont, a geologist with the Geoscience Branch of DNR (which was moved to the Department of Energy and Mines in July 2018), was quoted as saying, “All we need is the discovery of one significant gold vein and the Cobequids will light up.” Continue reading Fool’s gold: the resource curse strikes Nova Scotia (Part 3)

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There’s a 21st century gold rush starting in Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast, just as industrial gold mining is increasingly coming into disrepute around the world. It has been described as an “environmental disaster,” which often leads to contamination of water sources on which life depends. This is the second in a series of four articles on mining and quarrying in Nova Scotia. Earlier versions of these articles appeared in May and June 2018 in the Halifax Examiner and the Cape Breton Spectator. (I am pleased to say that this series of four articles has been shortlisted for an Atlantic Journalism Award in Excellence in Digital Journalism: Enterprise/Longform.)

Part 2. Going for gold

Screenshot of BNN interview of Atlantic Gold CEO Steven Dean (left) at the 2018 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention.

The CEO and chairman of Vancouver-based Atlantic Gold Corporation, Steven Dean, a man with a history of international coal and metal mining and former president of Teck Cominco, was being interviewed by Andrew Bell of the Business News Network (BNN).[1] Dean was talking up his company’s first gold mine, named Touquoy after a French miner who worked the deposit in the late 1800s, which had just gone into production in Moose River, Nova Scotia.

The interview was held at an ideal venue for Atlantic Gold to showcase its new open-pit gold mine, the first ever in Nova Scotia: the 2018 convention of the Prospectors and Developers Association (PDAC) of Canada in Toronto, the global mining industry’s “event of choice.”

Bell expressed amazement at the low cost – $550 – of producing an ounce of gold at the Touquoy mine. Dean told him the mine would produce about 90,000 ounces a year which, at current gold prices, would make it a “profitable mine” with about $90 million in “operating cash flow.” And, said Dean, Atlantic Gold planned to enter its second phase of operations by 2022, with more mines operating in the area, producing a total of 200,000 ounces a year. Continue reading Fool’s gold: the resource curse strikes Nova Scotia (Part 2)

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