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Federal And State Laws Regarding Bottled Water – Testimony Before The House Oversight And Government Reform Committee, Domestic Policy Subcommittee, Noah D. Hall

Noah D Hall

Water bottling is big business and getting bigger, growing by about ten percent annually over the past five years. The most important environmental concerns from a legal and regulatory perspective relate to the impact of water extraction to fill the billions of bottles Americans purchase every year. While water bottling has almost no impact on the total national freshwater supply, the majority of bottled water comes from groundwater which has a direct hydrologic connection to springs and other vulnerable surface waters. Thus, even relatively small water withdrawals for bottled water can produce significant impacts at the local scale on other …