In Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, the follow-up to Garbage Land, her influential investigation into our modern trash crisis, Elizabeth Royte ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source—of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion- a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns. Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and—in a world of increasing drought and pollution—better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

Elizabeth Royte is the author of Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest — both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications. Royte is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor for OnEarth, and a correspondent for Outside magazine. A former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and recipient of Bard College’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their daughter.

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