Jay Walljasper, Senior Fellow at On the Commons and editor of OnTheCommons.org, created OTC’s book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. A speaker, communications strategist and writer and editor, he chronicles stories from around the world that point us toward a more equitable, sustainable and enjoyable future. He is author of The Great Neighborhood Book and a senior associate at the urban affairs consortium Citiscope. Walljasper also writes a column about city life for Shareable.net and is a Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces and Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning. For more of his work, see JayWalljasper....
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How We Bought the Idea of Bottled Water
By Jay Walljasper
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The New York Times Book Review’s front-page review of Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It (Bloomsbury) is full of striking nuggets of information from what people are now calling “the water wars.”
• The CEO of Quaker Oats, which markets Propel Fitness Water and Gatorade, once declared, “the biggest enemy is tap water.”
• The National Coalition of American Nuns opposes bottled water on the moral grounds that life’s essential resources should not be privatized.
• One expert quoted in Bottlemania calculates, “The total energy required for every bottle’s production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil.”
• Elizabeth Royte estimates that the U.S. will need to spend $390 billion to repair and maintain water systems by 2020.
Posted June 18, 2008
