Bottlemania: Big Business, Local
Springs, and the Battle Over
Americas Drinking Water by
Elizabeth Royte
Water, Water, Everywhere? Well, Perhaps If It's Bottled
“An engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance…After
you read it you will sip warily from your water bottle.”—New York Times
Book Review
Bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in
the country. But what’s the cost of all this water—for us and for the
environment? In this eye-opening book, Elizabeth Royte does for water
what Michael Pollan did for food: She examines the people, machines,
economies, and cultural trends that surround it on its journey from distant
aquifers to our supermarkets and homes. She looks at the various sources
of drinking water (including the embattled Maine town that Poland Spring

exports from), the chemicals we dump into it to make it potable, and the
real differences between tap and bottled. Bottlemania is the story of one of
the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century—and one of the
most troubling issues facing our environment today. With a new afterword
on the developing issues in clean water around the world.
Personal Review: Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs,
and the Battle Over Americas Drinking Water by Elizabeth Royte
There are some who predict that water will be the next oil. The world has
not quite reached that point yet, but the early signs are painfully evident for
those who care to look. Oddly, millions of Americans are already willingly
and unnecessarily paying more per gallon for bottled water than they pay
for gasoline, even though they can get nearly the same water from the taps
for pennies.
Elizabeth Royte attempts to address the bizarre cult and psychology of
bottled water in her entertaining and highly readable book,
BOTTLEMANIA: HOW WATER WENT ON SALE AND WHY WE BOUGHT
IT. To her great credit, Ms. Royte tackles a macro issue through micro
means, turning what could have been pages of dry statistics into highly
personal stories that shed revealing light on how water issues, particularly
those raised by bottled water, affect local communities. The stories she
tells are devastating, as are the lessons to be learned.
For readers who, like me, are not well acquainted with the bottled water
world, the first important fact to know is who the players are. Not the
brands, the players. Heard of Poland Spring? Deer Park? Perrier? San
Pellegrino? Arrowhead? Calistoga? Ice Mountain? Ozarka? Zephyrhills?
All of those brands - all of them - are owned by one company, Nestle. How
about Aquafina? That's Pepsi. How about Dasani, or Glaceau? Those are
Coca-Cola. Evian? That's Danone (Dannon), but in the U.S., that's Coca-
Cola, too. Next, do you know that Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani are
just bottled tap water? Purified and with some minerals added, to be sure,
but just tap water. How about this one - that companies like Nestle extra
billions of gallons of spring water from around the United States and rarely
pay anything to the local community. In other words, they are selling a
product that comes to them for free. Or this one - that it takes 17 million
barrels of oil each year to make the plastic bottles for just the U.S. bottled
water market, which doesn't even begin to account for the oil consumed in
transporting those bottles to market or disposing of them.
Ms. Royte's book is full of information like this. She uses as her focal point
the long-term battles that have taken place in northwestern Maine between
Poland Spring (Nestle) and the local communities, particularly that of
Fryeburg. Along the way, the Fryeburg story provides her with a highly
local context in which to hash out the far larger national and even global
ramifications of control over water, from management of watersheds to
impacts of bottling on local watertables and aquifers, from tap water quality
to the environmental impact of countless millions of plastic water bottles.

The author even digresses into a couple of curiously humorous asides,
one concerning bottle water aficionados and another addressing the rather
unsettling notion of large scale recycling (for tap water consumption) of
water extracted from human waste.
BOTTLEMANIA will likely be, for many, a wake-up call. The environmental
impacts of bottled water are clearly horrendous, and the lack of regulation
and increasing corporatization and privatization of water supply (bottled or
not) should be distressing concerns not just in the United States, but
worldwide. In that regard, I very highly recommend a documentary DVD
called FLOW about international water privatization by companies like
Vivendi and Suez as as a remarkably on-point companion piece to Ms.
Royte's book.
Ms. Royte's book is not perfect - she is too reluctant to engage in polemics
when they are clearly called for, and at least some supplementary statistics
presented in tabular form (including a list of all the major and lesser bottled
waters and their ownerships) would have been helpful. In addition, she
takes perhaps too much of a pass on calling out Americans for their
gullibility, laziness, and gross wastefulness as it pertains to the entire
bottled water movement. Nevertheless, BOTTLEMANIA serves an
important educative purpose, and it does so in an engaging and
entertaining way. This is a book that should be required reading for every
high school student in America - regrettably, few will probably ever even
know about it.
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