Bottlemania
Author: Elizabeth Royte 2008 229 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started August 5 2008, Finished August 8 2008

“The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste test against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” (40-1)
“Bottled water does have its place – it’s useful in emergencies and essential for people whose health can’t tolerate even filtered water. But it’s often no better than tap water, its environmental and social price is high, and it lets our public guardians off the hook for protecting watersheds, stopping polluters, upgrading treatment and distribution infrastructure, and strengthening treatment standards.” (225)

Royte summarizes my interest in her subject, bottled water, in the above two passages. Nonetheless, the book failed to engage me. It felt both somewhat slight and fairly padded -- it would probably have been better as a magazine article and I did not come away from it feeling that my knowledge of the subject was greatly enhanced. Royte seems to feel that there is something inherently wrong forcing people to pay for as basic a commodity as water; my reaction is why not -- we pay for everything else. Too much of the book is devoted to an inconclusive history the water wars of Fryeburg Maine whence comes Poland Springs bottled water. Also, Royte and her editors lose credibility with the following statement that “In 2006, Nestlé’s 32 percent share of the US bottled-water market … brought profits of $7.46 billion” (86) which makes the elementary error of confusing sales with profits.

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Over 700 domestic and 75 imported brands of bottled water are sold in the US (17)
“In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 686 single-serve beverages per person per year; in 2007 we collectively drank fifty billion single-serve bottles of water alone.” (42)
[In NYC] “During the Dutch period, freshwater was used for livestock and cooking; the preferred beverage was beer, which everyone, including children, drank warm.” (95)
“Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1million). (106)
“In Fiji, as in Fryeburg, nothing’s simple.” (154)
“In Lagos, Nigeria, the poor pay four to ten times more for a liter of water than do people hooked up to water mains; in Lima, they pay seventeen times more; in Karachi, twenty-eight to eighty-three times more; in Jakarta, up to sixty times more; and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, up to one hundred times more.” (206)
“… according to the EPA, letting a faucet run for five minutes consumes about as much energy as burning a sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb for fourteen hours.” (218)