USA - City sees future in a bottle

City sees future in a bottle
December 24, 2007
By Brent Curtis
Herald Staff City officials are looking at exporting one of Rutland's purest commodities.Following the lead of other municipalities around the Northeast, Public Works Commissioner Paul Clifford has been pouring his efforts into finding a bottler who wants to sell water from the city's reservoir.After attending a Northeast Bottled Water Association seminar in September, Clifford has sent out two rounds of letters to 21 bottling companies in the region."It's something to try and if the market is right, I think it could work," Clifford said this week. "If the market is right and Rutland's name is on it, it could be a huge opportunity and a lot of money in it."For those who find the idea hard to swallow, look no farther than Worcester, Mass., an old industrial city and second-largest city in the Commonwealth. Worcester is home to Polar Beverages, which uses municipal water in that community for some of its beverages.An example closer to home can be found in Bennington, where water from an underground aquifer is sold to Vermont Pure Springs."There's a lot of competition out there," said Clifford, who noted many of the communities that have landed bottling contracts also have better transportation networks than Rutland.But he said the quality of Rutland's water supply is as good as its rivals."I think for the purity of it, it's a great product," he said. "If you sell it right from the filter and treat it to remove the taste of the chlorination, it's very good water."Rutland's water supply is collected from mountain streams running down Killington, Pico and the hills to the east. The tributaries pour into the bubbling Mendon Brook, following a tree-shaded course from its springhead high in the mountains to the Rutland Reservoir miles below.From there, the water passes through the city's sand-filtration system — an organic process that relies on microbes in the sand to accomplish the lion's share of purification. Sand filtering allows the city to reduce the amount of chlorine added to the water. The city also adds fluoride and zinc orthophosphate — a corrosion inhibitor designed to keep deposits within the city's old pipes bonded to the pipes and out of the water supply.If a bottling company were interested in the city's water supply, Clifford said he would look at either trucking the water to a distribution point or better yet, inviting the company to set up a bottling operation in the city limits. The public works commissioner said the city has plenty of excess capacity to sell."I know it's a long shot, but if we can find someone to bite on this, it would have a lot of potential," he said.Contact Brent Curtis at brent.curtis@rutlandherald.com.

No thanks.