Couple delves into the business of bottled water

HATCHER PASS — Lin and Jana Turner grew up knowing that certain wells in their neighborhood near Hatcher Pass were delivering good water. Now they've spent a good deal of spare time and taken a mortgage to finance a bottling operation next to their house.

The Turners have been marketing their label, Mt. McKinley Clear, for about a year. So far they've landed a contract to put their product inside Alaska Railroad cars and the Alaska Native Medical Center, and there's a distributor delivering the water north up the Parks Highway.

Jana Turner distributes to some local stores herself, and Lin Turner trucks pallets to NANA Management, the company that runs food concessions for the railroad and the Native hospital.

The Turners believe Mt. McKinley Clear is not just good water, but better- tasting water. And they say theirs is the only water plant of its type in Alaska.

That's because instead of purifying their water with filters, chemicals, distillation, the Turners' plant is bottling water straight from the ground.

"[The neighborhood] has good water, but not necessarily so much of it," Jana Turner said. "We got lucky."

In this case getting lucky meant the couple had their work cut out for them. The project took about eight years from the day serious planning started until the first pallet of bottles was sold in the summer of 2000.

A builder by trade, Lin still frames houses. He designed and built the bottling plant, complete with clean rooms that have pressurized air to keep dust out, and a chute for sliding boxes of bottles to the palletizing and loading area on the ground floor.

Jana still tends bar at the Fishhook Bar nearby, but the water project is growing.

When Lin finishes saying, "I built this in my spare time," Jana pipes in with, "Now we have no spare time."

And it wasn't just the building that took time. The foundation for the plant was put in just five years ago and the planning phase started three years before that. The Turners knew they would need permits from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and needed to design a bottling plant that could be built without too much debt.

The makers of bottling machines, of course, were eager to educate the entrepreneurs, but the DEC was a different story.

"They kept saying ‘Why don't you just ozinate it?'" Jana said. "Well, because it doesn't taste as good."

Ozination is a purification process in which ozone is injected into water to kill bacteria. Ozone generators run on electricity and generate ozone from the air. Ozone generators are used in all sorts of disinfecting procedures, and ozinated water is often used for killing bacteria in bottling plants of all sorts.

The Turners' plant has this technology, but uses it only for bottle and cap washing. The bottles are then filled with well water that has been through one sediment filter.

Water bottled at the source is as old as bottled water, certainly older than purification with ozone. But the Turners said convincing the people at Alaska DEC that it was OK to test water and bottle it without purification took time.

"I had no problems with the people, it's just that they had policies set for ozination and that's what they were used to," Lin said. "They kept trying to steer us that direction."

There are other water-bottling plants in the Valley. Lynn Lowman of the Alaska DEC's Division of Environmental Health said she hadn't heard of a plant that used the same methods as Mt. McKinley Clear.

But Lowman hesitated to say the water company was unique, and she pointed out that the DEC is interested only in water quality from a health standards perspective.

"The water quality is measured by the nature of the water after treatment, not by the methods of treatment," Lowman said. "If they want to say that they have the best water based on their method of treatment then that's a marketing claim that they can make."

Lowman said even though the Turners' claim that Mt. McKinley Clear is more natural than chemically treated water, as far as the DEC is concerned filtered water is the same as water treated with more extensive processing.

One local well-to-bottle water company uses a softener, reverse osmosis distillation, commercial ultraviolet sterilization, and a carbon filter.

The water operation most similar to Mt. McKinley Clear is likely Choice Alaska Artesian, bottled by the Alaska Artesian Bottling Company at Mile 51 Parks Hwy. Nancy Seime of Alaska Artesian said that plant uses a potassium softening system and ozination for their product water.

Seime said Alaskan Artesian is purified to ensure shelf life after bottling.

All commercial water companies have testing programs to ensure they pass the muster of health regulations, as do ice producers. In addition to testing the water itself, Alaska DEC inspects bottling plants as they would a commercial food service plant. The Turners pay for independent water testing and keep a file of test results for inspection by the DEC.

Lin said he realized early on that navigating the bureaucratic permitting process would require patience. The Turners said they spent almost as much time researching regulations from the alphabet soup of agencies — including the DEC, FDA, and EPA — as they did designing and building the bottling plant.

"I got real serious and decided I would not be denied," Lin said. "If [regulations] deny me, that's fine, but I will not deny myself just because I didn't want to work hard."