Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte

Author:Elizabeth Royte
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Studies, Non-Fiction, Sociology, Business, U.S.A.
ISBN: 9781596913714
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2008-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

BACKLASH

IN THE SPRING of 2007, monster rainstorms lash Central Texas, leaving thousands of people without clean water. In June and July, it’s the United Kingdom’s turn: back-to-back-to-back storms leave 350,000 people in Gloucestershire and the surrounding region without sanitary services or drinking water. The normally terrible weather, locals say, has gotten worse. Next up is South Asia, where unremitting rains—their intensity unusual even for Nepal, India, and Pakistan—leave millions without water and other basics. Authorities send out boil-water alerts, and shoppers lucky enough to have a bottled-water aisle—and the money to make use of it—strip those aisles clean.

Meanwhile, the beverage industry continues to release sunny news: Americans bought nearly eleven billion dollars’ worth of bottled water in 2006, and sales in 2007 are expected to rise 10 percent. In the European Union, South America, and Asia, the prognosis is similarly bright. I’m not surprised when I learn bad weather and good sales are linked.

But there are rumblings against bottled water too, and it isn’t just the nuns and the communists this time. In March, Alice Waters, goddess of the local-foods movement, decides to strike bottled water from her menu at Chez Panisse. “We asked where does all that energy and waste go, getting it to here and from here,” Mike Kossa-Rienzi, the restaurant’s general manager, says. “It wasn’t a hard decision.”

Soon, more restaurants on both U.S. coasts get religion. In London, where the distance food travels from farm to fork is already an obsession, the Green Party asks diners to request tap water; in France, fashion designer Pierre Cardin designs a water carafe, which he distributes free to thirty thousand Parisian restaurants, hoping to persuade his bottle-loving countrymen to drink from the tap (a mélange of groundwater from sixty-three springs, plus surface water from the Seine, Oise, and Marne rivers).

In San Francisco, which drinks EPA-approved unfiltered water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, Mayor Gavin Newsom announces he’ll no longer spend taxpayer dollars on bottled water—a savings of half a million dollars a year, not counting the cost of hauling the empties away. Mayors of Salt Lake City, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, and Minneapolis soon follow suit. New York City launches a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar ad campaign to promote tap, and Chicago passes a five-cent bottled-water tax, which is expected to raise more than ten million dollars a year for the city and also cut its waste-hauling costs (that is, if the law isn’t overturned by angry retailers and the International Bottled Water Association, which represents 162 bottlers in the United States).

Suddenly bottled water is big news. Every time I open a newspaper, magazine, or Web browser, there’s another story announcing that this harmless indulgence is anything but. On the lookout for this sort of material, I nearly drown in the tidal wave of eco-criticism. With a mounting sense of anticipation—how far will the attacks go, and is the backlash only a fad?—I watch as reporters, using statistics from academics and environmental groups, blast away at the bottled-water industry.

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