Leonie Johnsen

Most people in New Zealand have no idea what is happening with our water consents – or how much of our groundwater is being handed over to private companies under conditions that would never apply to ordinary households.

The recent approval of the Ōtākiri water bottling expansion is a clear reminder of how urgently we need transparency around the management and allocation of our water.

The new consents allow the company to extract up to 1.1 billion litres of water a year from the aquifer beneath us.

That’s enough water every single day to supply 3000-5000 New Zealand households.

And while households on council supply pay volumetric charges – for example, Tauranga residents pay $3.87 per 1000 litres – bottling companies taking water from private bores pay no per-litre charge or water royalty at all.

They pay only for consent processing and limited environmental monitoring.

Yet, with this Ōtakiri water bottling expansion the community will bear the real cost: 184 heavy-truck movements a day, increased road wear funded through our rates, the industrialisation of a rural area, and the long-term risk of aquifer decline.

And that harm has not hit us yet – aquifer damage is slow, silent, and hidden until the day it finally isn’t.

We should also be honest about who stands to benefit.

This expansion was not conceived by a small local operator. It was engineered in 2016 by Nongfu Spring, one of the world’s largest bottled-water corporations, through its New Zealand subsidiary, Creswell NZ.

Nongfu applied to the Overseas Investment Office to purchase the Ōtākiri plant and immediately sought to increase extraction from under 2 million litres a year to over 1.1 billion litres. They designed the high-speed bottling lines, the export model, and the trucking route to Port of Tauranga.

Although public pressure forced the withdrawal of the formal sale agreement, the consents they drove remain in place – structured perfectly for large-scale international export.

Local ownership on paper may have changed, but the scale and commercial logic still serve offshore interests.

This consent will allow the production of up to two billion single-use plastic bottles every year.

In an era of accelerating climate disruption, increasing drought risk, and global water scarcity, New Zealand is allowing its groundwater – one of our most precious natural resources – to be bottled in plastic and exported without any per-litre payment to the public.

The media has not told this story clearly. When I raise it with people, almost nobody knows the scale, the history, or the implications.

Coverage has been fragmented and highly legalistic, framed as a narrow dispute between Ngāti Awa and the courts, rather than a national conversation about environmental protection, community impact, and water sovereignty.

Why are we producing water in plastic – and giving it away for free – while households pay rising charges and communities shoulder the risk?