Bottles, Bottles Everywhere, Amid the Drops You Drink

New York City is campaigning to stop bottled water consumption in favor of good old tap water. But we, as New Yorkers have to do our part as well. Read the latest blog post from the New York Times' City Room:

Bottles, Bottles Everywhere, Amid the Drops You Drink

City Council Shuns Bottles in Favor of Water From Tap

From the New York Times, June 17th, 2008

Last week, the speaker’s office announced that it would stop buying bottled water for the Council’s downtown offices, which went through at least 6,000 single-serving bottles last year. As a result, bottled water will no longer be available at City Council events or official functions.

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Bottlemania: Great New Book on Bottled Water

Check out this new book on bottled water: BOTTLEMANIA: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, by Elizabeth Royte. Read about it in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

Tapped Out

To paraphrase an old axiom: You don’t buy water, you only rent it. So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance. Partway through her undoctrinaire book, Royte, a lifelong fan of tap water, refills her old plastic water bottle, reflecting that “what once seemed so simple and natural, a drink of water, is neither. All my preconceptions about this most basic of beverages have been queered.” And by the end of the book she will have discarded the old plastic bottle too, but not the tap.