Peats Ridge bottles on despite plant closure

Coca-Cola Amatil will continue production of its Peats Ridge Spring Water range, despite shutting down bulk packaging of water at its site in Peats Ridge, NSW, citing a decrease in demand for bulk packaged water.

The company's public affairs director, Sally Loane, confirmed to Food & Drink Business it would continue to market the Peats Ridge Spring Water brand in Australia, but bottling would be moved to a larger facility in Sydney.

The company originally bought the operation at Peats Ridge in 2003. In recent years, however, it has only maintained a small packaging presence at the site, employing just four people. CCA said the four staff had accepted redundancy packages.

It said, however, it would continue to source water from the site.

“We will continue to maintain the site and continue to extract some water under our current licence, but we don’t have firm plans as to how much water will be extracted,” the company said.

“We have a number of spring water sources in NSW and we balance our supply across all the sources while maintaining the sustainability of the sources at all times.”

In 2008 the company won a legal battle to raise the volumes of water at the site, against opposition from community groups concerned about the impact of such a move on ground water levels.

CCA said the company had taken care to address such concerns.

“The most important thing to understand is that we are the only business in the Peats Ridge area which has continuous measuring, monitoring and reporting of the water we extract from the aquifer - no other business we know does this,” it said in its original statement.

“We are rigorous about maintaining a sustainable source and will never compromise the source.”