Better than Snake Oil
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It: Author Elizabeth Royte
By Reanna Alder
The Tyee.ca, August 25, 2008

In my Waterworld -esque post-apocalyptic fantasy, when rising oceans have submerged the continents and billions of capped, air-filled drink bottles have wiggled loose from the trash heaps of the world and gunned to the surface like bats out of hell, I plan to build an enormous raft out of Aquafina and Pepsi bottles for all my friends to live on.

Because that would be like totally upcycling.

Turns out I don't even have to wait till we're all under water: two Americans are already sailing from Los Angeles to Hawaii on a raft built with 15,000 water bottles and a Cessena 310 "to raise awareness about plastic fouling our oceans."

En route, the pair are doing surface trawls, collecting samples of the billions of tiny pieces of plastic that are turning the oceans into "plastic soup." As a recent Georgia Straight article explains, fish mistake these bits of plastic for zooplankton, and the toxins rocket up the food chain to human babies.

Awareness, it seems, still needs to be raised: despite our appetite for all things "greenish," single-use packaging remains de rigueur among large swaths of society, and bottled water in particular has become a daily accessory for many, an expected luxury wherever the relatively well-heeled are in a hurry.

Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, wants to change all that.

The answer to the titular question is a combination of fashion and fear: the ubiquitous bottle made its way into our consciousness as a status symbol via brands like Evian and Perrier, clutched in the tabescent hands of models and celebrities, and secured its hold thanks to mounting fears about polluted water, and a marketing-induced obsession with hydration.

Bottlemania documents the toll that packaged water takes on the environment, from the plastic it's moved around in, to the fuel required to pump and transport it out of its original watershed. (Royte centres her narrative on the town of Fryeburg, Maine, where Nestlé pumps water for its Poland Spring brand.) But the greatest risk of all, Royte says, is that the more bottled water we drink, the less investment we will make in existing public water systems.

"If we continue in [this] direction," she says, "there'll be even less money and political support to protect watersheds and to invest in the infrastructure repairs that we desperately need." The rich will drink bottled water and the rest will be left with increasingly degraded tap.

More: http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/08/25/Water/
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