The persistent drought is not taking its toll on the mineral water production business in Catalonia, which in 2023 extracted about 1,781,470 cubic meters of water from the subsoil or, in other words, 1,781 cubic hectometers or about 1,781 million liters. , according to provisional data provided by the Department of Business and Labor.
A figure 5% lower than that recorded the previous year (1.86 hm3) and just 2% higher than the statistical average of the exploitation regime of the last 23 years. To get an idea of ??what these figures mean, in a normal situation 7.5 million inhabitants consume 1 hm3, 1,000 million liters per day. The sum of all the mineral waters present in Catalonia does not reach 2 hm3 per year.
Catalonia has seventeen mineral water bottling companies, of which eight are concentrated in the Selva region, and of these more than 60% are fed by the springs in the Montseny and Les Guilleries area.
Xavier Civit, president of Associació Catalana d’Envasadors d’Aigua (Acea), an umbrella under which 60% of bottling plants are grouped, emphasizes that the drought has had no impact on the sector, neither on production nor in consumption.
“The groundwater we extract is very deep, it ranges between 20 and 400 meters depending on the spring, and the underground water pools are balanced depending on dry and rainy years,” he explains.
Civit confirms that Catalonia has already experienced other episodes of drought, such as 2008 and 1990, which have had no impact on production. It is an explanation along the lines proposed by the Generalitat that affects the idea that short drought cycles do not have a significant impact on activity.
“Mineral waters have, due to their characteristics, very long transit times in the subsoil, up to hundreds of years,” he states. Furthermore, the extractive volume is regulated by the competent administrations, which set a limit that Civit ensures is never exceeded.
It denies that the resource is being overexploited as some naturalistic entities believe and argues that water bottling plants only consume 0.03% of the existing underground water resources.
However, environmental groups demand complete studies to evaluate a possible impact that this industry may have on the environment and a review of the state Mining Law, which dates back to 1973.
“It is an obsolete Francoist law that does not take into account the European framework regulations for the protection of aquifers,” explains Carles Lumeras, from the Coordinator for the Safeguarding of Montseny. In 2020, they promoted a Popular Legislative Initiative that required 50,000 signatures to be discussed in Parliament, but the outbreak of Covid left it on empty paper.
They proposed a moratorium on the granting of new extractions, the limitation of permitted flows and the preparation of a scientific study to determine the capacity and state of the Montseny-Guilleries aquifer. Some demands that Lumeras affirms are still valid. They also demand that the extraction data of each of the companies in the sector be made public.
On the other hand, Joan Carles Ximenes, spokesperson for Llèmena Espai Natural, also requests a study that evaluates the hypothetical impact that the only bottling company in the area has. “Nearby sources are drying up, we cannot say that it is due to this activity, but given the uncertainty it is advisable to do some study,” he explains and adds that he sees it as “unfair” that in an emergency situation like the current one, water reduction measures are applied. consumption in livestock, agriculture and industry and not in water extraction.
Bottling plants will also see a reduction in the consumption of industrial water that they can use for their production processes (cleaning bottles, for example), which when the emergency comes into effect will be 30% lower.
