If you regularly drink bottled water, read this book and learn how you have been a victim of marketing to convince you that you need something that you don't need. Not only that, you are consuming something that you can get from the tap, and not harming the environment by creating unnecessary transport, packaging, and clean-up costs, not to mention those environmentally ruinous plastic bottles.

This is an eminently readable and insightful book, not a diatribe. It will keep you interested and leave your edified by what you have learned, while learning how you have been snookered.

In fact, one big bottled water company was found using tapwater!

From a recent interview with the author, Elizabeth Royte:

Q: Twenty years ago, you write, bottled water was a niche market in the U.S. Today, it's a more than $10 billion business. What the heck happened? Why did Americans start drinking so much bottled water?

A: The simplest reason is marketing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on advertising that either told us explicitly or implied that bottled water was better. [Bottled-water companies] used words like pure and natural, and used images of athletes and models and celebrities -- the advertisements were aspirational, they told us we'd be more like these people if we drank this product.

While this marketing juggernaut was going on, there was also, until quite recently, a total absence of criticism. There was no competition from tap water, because utilities don't have their own marketing budgets or ad budgets to tell us, "Tap water is great! Drink more tap water, and you'll be thin, and look more beautiful, and do better yoga poses."

You can read the entire interview at Grist

An online reviewer observes:

"Elizabeth Royte has written the best book available on the bottled water industry. Focusing on Nestle Waters North America and its Poland Spring operations in Maine, Royte's writing is knowledgeable, even-handed, and hip, and has none of the hyperbolic mewling that many environmentalist writers fall prey to. She provides sweeping and insightful coverage of the history, hydrogeology, chemistry, technology, politics, economics, and social psychology of the commodification of water. Readers will develop a better appreciation of just how unhealthy, environmentally destructive, and frankly crazy it is to buy and drink bottled water. An enlightening joy to read. Thanks, Elizabeth!"

Another online reviewer notes:

The title is cute and catchy and implies the book is a lightweight screed about the erstwhile evils of drinking bottled water. Yes, the initial starting point for Ms. Royte's inquiry was asking some simple questions about the impacts and equities of a corporation bottling huge quantities of Maine springwater. But this is an important environmental book, in the same league as "An Inconvenient Truth".

This is because Ms. Royte's simple questions about bottled water lead her and us on an exploration of a whole hidden world of our water and sanitation resources and infrastructure that lies behind our taps. How does bottled springwater differ from tap water in terms of harmful biological and chemical contaminants? How did the fad of chugging water out of throwaway plastic bottles catch on? Where does our tap water come from? How is it treated? Is that necessarily good for us? What is happening to the watersheds that all of us depend on? How can they be protected? How are water and sanitation systems interrelated? Are these groundwater and freshwater issues affected by other environmental trends, like global warming? And so on.

Like Ms. Royte, you will probably come to the end of this brisk, readable work knowing a lot more about your own water and sanitation then you did when you began and have a much better appreciation of the somewhat unsurprising policy conclusions she reaches: that protecting our public drinking water "commons" makes more sense than drinking water bottled at distant plants.