Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It | 
 enlarge | Author: Elizabeth Royte
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 14055
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 5 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 1596913711
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.4766361
EAN: 9781596913714
ASIN: 1596913711
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
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Product Description
An incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water.
Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why.
In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?
A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out two dollars to quench their daily thirst.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
Important Reading that Raises Important Questions August 13, 2008
I found this book to be highly informative, putting a human face on a series of complex issues without simple answers. The book itself draws uncertain conclusions and leaves ultimate decisions in the hands of individual consumers and the masses, both localized and globalized. I found myself armed with new factual information with which to present my own arguments and with which to make my own personal decisions, including many surprising tidbits that were truly eye-openers. Despite a lengthy bibliography, an early factual error (on page 21, where the City of Boston was said to draw its water from the Connecticut River) led me to more closely question other factual information with which I may be less familiar. That minor annoyance aside, I would suggest Bottlemania as recommended reading for anybody who consumes water - and that is every one of us.
 Anti Business Polemic August 9, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Although many reviewers have commented on the author as an environmentalist, she is really opposed to corporations developing and marketing something as basic to nature as water. She finds this essentially offensive, as if a large corporation might automate the raising of organic bean sprouts and deliver them to grocery stores. It takes the environmental revolutionary and the Vermont coop out of the equation. If everyone drinking sugar-laden sodas were to switch to bottled water, as many have, the health of these people would improve. Somehow, the back-to-nature mentality of the author does not allow for the fact that modern, corporate processing of water results in fine water. If a corporation markets and sells something, creating employment and wealth, environmentalist paranoia dictates that the corporation must be selling poison.
 Excellent research and writing on this priority subject August 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bottlemania: how water went on sale and why we bought it
By
Elizabeth Royte
(Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York - First edition 2008)
What is our future if water, life's most vital necessity, becomes a commodity - to be sold for profit - rather than a shared commons? In this fast-moving, well-researched book, Elizabeth Royte describes the astonishing increase in sales of bottled water in the U.S.; this, despite the fact that tap water costs anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, is more strictly regulated, and comes out evenly in blind tests against the top brand names.
Royte raises two main questions: "One has concrete answers: what are the physical differences between tap water and bottled, and what is water bottling actually doing to the environment and the local communities? The other questions are more abstract: Even if bottled water makes sense, for health or other reasons, even if it is harmless, is it ethical to profit from its sale? If we believe water is a basic human right - such as freedom from persecution or equality before the law - then why would we let anyone slap a bar code on it?
In addressing the first question, Royte describes the struggles of the residents of Fryeburg, Maine - population 3,000 - to stop Poland Springs, owned by Nestle, from continuing to extract water from their local, pristine watershed to supply their bottling plant in the nearby town of Hollis. The struggle has been ongoing for over four years and it is tearing the town apart. Some residents claim that their wells are running dry but find this hard to prove against Nestle's array of experts that claim they are not over-pumping. Other residents are concerned with the effects of water drawdown on those creatures that depend on the watershed streams and springs for their survival. Others question the right of a powerful multinational to override the wishes of a small community to maintain their lifestyle. And yet other town residents are amenable to what they perceive as improvements brought about by the bottling company. Sadly, the result is a small town divided into factions, with the outcome still unclear.
Royte explains the reasons for the skyrocketing sales of bottled water. Unbelievably, from only 1990 to 1997, U.S. sales of bottled water increased from $115 million to $4 billion. Clever, multimillion dollar marketing stressed the need to drink at least eight, eight fluid ounce bottles per day; the "chic appeal" of being seen taking sips from your individual bottle - a sign of a busy life style that precluded time out for relaxation; and the convenience of having a bottle in hand rather than having to seek out a water fountain or office cooler. The increase was also due to an often-overlooked invention - PET plastic that enabled the manufacture of stronger, lighter and potentially recyclable bottles.
Unfortunately, this craze for bottled water is placing ever more stress on the environment. As explained by Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institue, the energy required for the manufacture, transport and disposal of each bottle is equivalent to filling one quarter of the bottle with oil. And only 15% of these bottles get recycled. Most are buried in landfills or are burned in incinerators.
According to Royte, in 2006, 44% of bottled water sold in the U.S. came from municipal supplies. This is certainly less harmful than pumping from aquifers although the bottling companies deny any harm and claim that they pump at sustainable rates - after all, this is in their own interests. Even though the bottlers claim that they only remove .02% of the total annual groundwater withdrawal, we must remember that this water is permanently removed from the watershed, unlike the local utility that discharges used water into the same watershed.
With public thirst for bottled water on the increase, the water multinationals are fanning out all over the U.S. in search of fresh sources. So far, the towns are reacting like deer caught in the headlights and seem unable to promulgate ordinances prohibiting outsiders from mining their water for gain. The one exception (there may be others since the book was published) is the tiny hamlet of Barnstead, N.H. which, in 2006, was the first municipality in the U.S. to ban extraction of their water for sale elsewhere.
The discovery of the disinfection properties of chlorine, and the commencement of its widespread use in drinking water, in 1920, was the start of the successful public control of drinking water, and the setting of standards for maximum levels of various pollutants - standards and pollutants that are constantly being revised.
One of the more ominous threats to drinking water quality is global warming. Heavier storms that are becoming the norm wash excesses of pollutants of all kinds into surface and ground waters, and overwhelm sewage treatment plants. Among these pollutants are atrazine, a widely-used herbicide that can cause birth defects and whose use is being enhanced by the ethanol boom; and 0157:H7, a virulent strain of E coli, originating in cattle and that does not respond to chlorine.
Eliminating these dangerous contaminants, and others, and complying with strict federal standards is a monumental task for the purveyors of public drinking water. On the whole, throughout the U.S., municipal water is safe to drink. However, Royte does suggest the use of individual filters to protect the very young and the very old, or those with immune-deficient systems.
Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani are both drawn from municipal sources. However, bottled water, whether drawn from municipal sources or local aquifers does not have to comply with the stringent regulations imposed on municipal water. And despite its intensive marketing, blind tests generally fail to differentiate between bottled and tap water.
In times of severe storms that are becoming more frequent, as already mentioned, bottled water could be the only alternative. But, in the absence of such disasters, Royte is a firm advocate of using public supplies. As she so eloquently states: "Switching to bottled water isn't something I'm willing to contemplate at this point: it's expensive, it's heavy to haul around, and the production and disposal of all those bottles can't be good for the planet... Opting out of public water in favor of private isn't going to help preserve - or improve - municipal water supplies, but preserve them we must: too many people can afford to drink nothing but."
Review by Marian H. Rose, PhD
Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition
 Long on strident advocacy: short on provable facts August 2, 2008
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
I was pre-disposed to liking this book based upon its full title alone: "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It". Indeed, I look at people with their fancy, expensive bottled waters and chuckle. Tap water in most US cities is good enough for me. So I sat down with "Bottlemania", enitrely prepared to enjoy a roasting of the bottled water industry and (in my opinion) the foolish people who buy most of its wares.
I quickly realized that "Bottlemania" was long on strident advocacy and short on provable facts. Ms. Royte apparently sees herself as something on an Ida Tarbell, the early 20th Century "muckraker" whose "exposes" of Standard Oil roused the nation's indignation. Like Tarbell, however, Royte plays fast and loose with what she sets forth as "facts". For example, on pasge 84, the naked claim that ". . . nearly 40% of the nation's rivers and streams are too polluted for fishing and swimming, to say nothing of drinking." Says who? Royte provides no specific reference, no support for this remarkable claim. I spent some time trying to find a credible source and could not.
The Appendix supplied is " . . . a list of internet sources for more information on the topices covered in this book, as well as information on how to learn more about water quality in your area". Most of the sources provided are advocacy groups of one kind or another, not impartial purveyors of facts. Royte's bibliography consists mostly of newspaper and magazine articles.In short, Royte has approached her subject with an axe to grind and grind it she does.
While Royte does trot out alleged facts here and there from credible objective sources, I would not trust her reporting because of the adversarial edge she displays toward bottled water purveyors specifically, big corporations in general and, overall, the free market system.
The final chapter is a hodge-podge of practical suggestions for water conservation, a good idea no matter what your politics, and substantial government intervention to keep you from "wasting" water, including of course high taxes on water. We are to at less meat because "the water footprint of a four-ounce hamburger produced in California is 616 gallons". In keeping with Royte's style, no source is suggested for this alleged "fact". Thanks are given to Royte to "anti-globalization" groups.
It is really sad, I think, that Royte could not be bothered with supporting her arguments with attributable facts, because her basic points are valid. The unrestricted exploitation of water resources for water to bottle and sell at enormous profit is bad on the face of it. One needn't resort to the unprovable to prove this point. Royte's conclusion in the closing pages that "bottled water is often no better than tap water, [but] its environmental and social price is high . . ." is indisputable.
In sum, this could have been an excellent book and a substantial contribution to public discourse on an important subject. Instead is is a sensationalist tract filled with unprovable, agenda driven claims masquerding as "facts".
This book is written for those who already and unreservably believe in the "environmentalist" religion. It is not for those secularists who prefer that all claims be supported by provable facts.
Royte makes her beliefs clear in a single sentence: "[i]f someday I find myself wanting to buy bottled water, I will do it as an informed consumer, someone who knows tht the images on the label may not reflect an ecological reality, that part of its sticker price may be landing in the pockets of lawyers and PR flacks, that profits probably aren't benefiting those who live near the source, and that the bottle and its transportation have a significant carbon footprint".
Guess what, Ms. Royte, parts of the sticker price of your book goes into the pockets of lawyers and PR flacks. And it is unlikely that the people who cut down the trees used to make the paper your words are printed on don't profit significantly from their efforts. Speaking of carbon footprints, how about the energy consumed in making the paper and ink used in your book, the printing and transportation of it, the air conditioning in the stores where it is sold and so on?
Many of Royte's points are valid, but her sensationalist style strips her of credibility. In the final analysis, this just another anti-capitalist, anti-democratic screed. Too bad, because buried under all the left-wing rhetoric is a valid point: for the most part bottled water in the United States is wasteful silliness.
Jerry
My impressions of Bottlemania August 1, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Anyone reading this book will hopefully pick up their plastic water bottles and heave them into the recycling bin. This is an excellent piece identifying both sides of the contentious issue of the right to water and who should use it. This book is worth reading for anyone in the developed world.
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