Book Review: Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It

Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania was published in 2008, but is still informative. A longer review can be found here, but some key points are that Royte’s goal is to address these two questions:

• What are the physical differences between tap and bottled water, and how does water bottling affect the environment and local communities?
• Even if bottled water makes sense for health or other reasons, is it ethical to profit from its sale?

A controversy in Maine about expansion of Nestlé-owned Poland Spring bottling facilities is a thread throughout the book. Royte also describes the expensive efforts in some Midwestern municipal water treatment facilities to remove the herbicide atrazine while questioning why actions to prevent pollutants from entering water resources in the first place isn’t a higher societal priority. Royte lives in New York City which, like Portland, has high quality municipal water and the author supports investment in water services infrastructure. After all her research she continues to drink tap water, though she does stop using a plastic water bottle.

For more from Bottlemania check out this longer review. 

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