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Through a Writer’s Lens
Veteran Journalist Shines in Book on Bottled Water
By Stephen Hochbrunn, NEIWPCC
Early in Bottlemania, Elizabeth Royte’s informative and frequently compelling examination of the bottled water phenomenon, she notes that just 20 years ago the United States had no large scale water-bottling industry. Of course, most Americans did not have cell phones 20 years ago either, but that is technology. We expect rapid change there. It is quite another story to consider the swift rise of America’s bottled water giants, and the ease with which so many people have ditched inexpensive, almost uniformly high quality water coming out of the tap for the comparatively expensive, far less regulated water in plastic bottles with pretty labels.
In 20 years, the United States has evolved from a land where bottled water was served rarely—usually only when there were guests to impress—to a nation where sports stadiums are built without water fountains but with dozens of Dasani-stocked concession stands. The consequences have been profound, and Royte examines them at length, using her gift for storytelling and finely honed skills as a reporter. Royte has written for the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, and wrote the critically acclaimed book Garbage Land, which examines what happens to America’s trash after it is thrown out. That she has turned her writer’s eye to the world of water is something for which those of us familiar with the issues she explores can only be grateful. Her take is fresh, personal, educational, and usually engrossing.
At the heart of Royte’s narrative is the conflict between Nestlé (the Swiss parent of Poland Spring) and residents of the tiny town of Fryeburg, Maine, who feel Nestlé’s use of the area’s groundwater to fill countless bottles of Poland Spring is devastating the aquifer that plays a central role in the area’s ecosystem and supplies the town’s water. Royte introduces us to the key players on the conflict’s stage, including Howard Dearborn, a zealous Nestlé opponent who by book’s end has grown so cantankerous he reduces the author to tears and threatens to throw her in his beloved Lovewell Pond, which Dearborn believes is suffering from the bottled water withdrawals. As Royte delves deeper into the conflict, she visits the Poland Spring bottling plant in Hollis, Maine, where bottles are filled at the astonishing pace of 1,200 per minute. It is hard to believe that the bottled water industry’s intensive levels of production, and the distribution of the water often far from its watershed of origin, cannot be having an environmental impact. The bottlers of course do not deny an impact. They just argue the sources of their water can handle it.
There is enough happening in Fryeburg, and Royte’s insights into the characters and the conflict are so original and strong, that her excursions into related subjects can be disappointing. You yearn for her to stay with the story unfolding tensely in the Maine town. But Bottlemania is not billed as a chronicle of the saga in Fryeburg, and there is much to be gained from sticking with the author on her journeys elsewhere. A chapter called “Aftertaste” could serve as a primer on the concerns about contaminants in tap water. There are absorbing discourses on the public drinking water systems of New York City, whose residents (when they are not swilling Poland Spring) quench their thirst with water funneled down from the Catskill Mountains through a reservoir-and-tunnel system of stunning scope, and Kansas City, which draws its water supply directly from the tainted, muddy Missouri River and cleanses it to a safe drinking water level via treatment processes understandably viewed as extraordinary by an outsider like Royte.
Sprinkled throughout Bottlemania are astounding nuggets of information. Who knew that running a faucet for five minutes uses as much energy as burning a 60-watt incandescent light bulb for 14 hours? Or that the process of making and filling plastic water bottles uses twice as much water as the bottles ultimately contain? One of the reasons: bottle-making machines are cooled by water.
These facts have appeared elsewhere, of course, and the subject of bottled water and its social and environmental implications are hardly unchartered territory for journalists. What separates Bottlemania from the pack is that Royte is your escort, sharing keen, quirky observations and the revelations of the struggles in her own mind to make sense of what she learns. In Fryeburg, you might expect her to side with the Davids and cast Nestlé as the Goliath and villain. While Royte does have her sympathies for Dearborn and the anti-Poland Spring crowd, she is not repelled by bottled springwater—or the tactics of the companies that produce it. “If I were in the containerized-water business,” she writes, “I’d do everything in my power to either hide the bubblers or make public supplies look wildly unattractive.”
Royte paints the Fryeburg conflict as a small-town divide that raises much bigger, fundamental questions. In a time of water scarcity in so many places around the world, and with climate change threatening to make matters worse, should the private sector be determining what is a sound water practice? If public monies and programs help protect the watershed that feeds the aquifer which sends pure water streaming through a bottled water company’s spigots, should not the public share in the corporation’s profits? Bottled water companies argue there already is an economic return to the public: jobs. And small towns everywhere, including in Maine, can use every one of them. Are the jobs worth the price that Dearborn says he and his pond are paying? In the Fryeburgs of the world, this is the question that must be confronted.
The pre-bottled water era that ended some 20 years ago now seems quaint and far removed. That was a world without Aquafina and Poland Spring, without bottled water defenders and protesters, without armies of hydrogeologists and lawyers arguing both sides of the war over water withdrawals by profit-seeking corporations. The reality today is that an entire generation of kids is growing up thinking water sold in a bottle is the norm. In Bottlemania, Royte ponders where these kids’ allegiances will be when they become adults and it comes time to support bond issues and other revenue-raising measures to upgrade municipal water treatment. For those who believe that clean, safe water straight from the tap is a basic right, that may be the greatest worry.