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ABOUT Bottlemania In the follow-up to Garbage Land, her influential investigation into our modern trash crisis, 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.
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"[A] timely, densely reported but also very readable and distressing examination of the way we drink. The reader comes away with the creepy notion that every last clean drop on the planet is already accounted for - either being muddied with pollutants and then zapped with disinfectants by municipal systems, or pumped and sold as a luxury item." --Abe Streep, San Francisco Chronicle (read the whole review here) "This tautly paced volume more closely resembles a travel narrative than a tree-hugging jeremiad. Seamlessly blending scientific explanation and social observation, she pursues the course of Poland Spring back to its source in Fryeburg, Maine. " --Mark Coleman, Los Angeles Times (read the whole review here) Available now! Buy the Book: Amazon, Powells, Booksense Read Salon's "conversation" with Elizabeth. Listen to Elizabeth on NPR's Marketplace. Read Elizabeth's NY Times Op Ed about public water fountains. Listen to Elizabeth on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show. Read her responses to listener questions in this Bottled Water FAQ. Elizabeth goes up against Joseph Doss, CEO of the International Bottled Water Association on BlogTalkRadio. (fast forward to minute 10 for their conversation) Read a Bottlemania excerpt. Read more reviews. Explore Elizabeth's water links. Read about Elizabeth Royte, and her books Garbage Land and The Tapir's Morning Bath, both New York Times Notable Books. |
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NY Times Book Review Front Page Review: "The facile answer
is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink, streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance." --Lisa Margonelli (