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.