“Bottlemania” by Elizabeth Royte

Bottlemania - How Water Went On Sale and How We Bought It - Elizabeth Royte

ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source—of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns. Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and—in a world of increasing drought and pollution—better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

From the website Bottlemania.

More on this after we score a copy of the book. Disclosure: Liz Royte and I were classmates at Bard College, and are on speaking terms. That said, she can write, she’s not afraid of complexity and she’s good at making complexity explicable. (Unlike the previous sentence, which took a simple notion and made it unpronounceable).