[K]eurig Green Mountain announced this week that it would spend $1 million on improving the nation’s water quality and partner with the Nature Conservancy to help clean up Lake Champlain.
Keurig, based in Waterbury, will give the nonprofit organization $500,000 to write a “blueprint” that will help the two plan to preserve natural resources surrounding Lake Champlain. Another $500,000 is earmarked to improve the Great Lakes.
The news comes six months after the company pledged up to $1 million for five years to improve water quality in Vermont. The company wrote in a news release that it expected other funders to match their donations.
To kick off the project, the Nature Conservancy is creating a Natural Infrastructure Blueprint that will show which areas surrounding Lake Champlain receive the most pollution. The Nature Conservancy and its partners will use the blueprint to turn the shoreline land in those identified areas back into something that will filter pollutants.
Heather Furman, the state director for the Nature Conservancy, said the group wants to “buy and restore lands” around the lake. Much of the land might include “marginal agricultural land,” such as farmland that floods every time there’s rainfall and doesn’t produce the best crops.
The state is in the middle of a long-term process to improve the quality of public bodies of water. In the Lake Champlain basin, agricultural runoff is often blamed for adding phosphorus to the lake and causing toxic blue-green algae blooms.
“We’re really talking about something much more functional than a buffer,” Furman said. “What we want to do is really restore full systems so that it’s actually a functioning ecosystem.
“This money is going to galvanize further investment,” Furman said. “It’s going to require some match, and that match can make the dollars that we’re getting from Keurig go that much farther.”
Furman said the organization has its eye on many potential groups that could expand on Keurig’s work: the Vermont Department of Agriculture, the Lewis Creek Association, the Winooski Valley Park District and the Vermont Land Trust.
“We’re hoping to probably launch three or four projects this spring, right off the top, to retire some of the more problematic areas and restore these floodplains,” said Eve Frankel, spokesperson for the Nature Conservancy. “There’s the potential for Keurig to continue to invest in year two and year three.”
Kristen Mercure, spokesperson for Keurig, said the company developed comprehensive environmental plans in 2014 to lower its carbon footprint, among other things. The company says many of the K-cup pods are recyclable, and wants to make investments in community projects that offset, ounce-for-ounce, the same amount fresh water the company’s products use.
“Water for us is one of our key pillars as a company,” Mercure said. “Everything that you make as a brewer is only able to be made because of the high-quality water coming out of your tap.
“As a neighbor we want to make sure that we can help out in some capacity our 2,000 employees living and working in Vermont,” she said. “We’re kicking off with Vermont. The next venture is with the Great Lakes.”
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 250,000 people get their drinking water from Lake Champlain. About 145,000 of those are in Vermont, according to the Lake Champlain Basin Program.
In the Midwest, about three million people get drinking water from the Great Lakes, according to Keurig.
