Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America's Drinking Water

for eight glasses a day, about forty-nine cents a year. Buy that water in bottles and you’d be spending $1,400.

Raising water rates is one answer; a tax on bottled water is another; and a clean-water trust fund, financed by industries that profit off of, or damage the quality of, clean water, is yet one more.

the water footprint of a four-ounce hamburger produced in California is 616 gallons. A cotton T-shirt is backed by 528.3 gallons of water, a single cup of coffee, 52.8.

letting a faucet run for five minutes consumes about as much energy as burning a sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb for fourteen hours.

For example, we can build new homes with “dual plumbing”

But refusing Dasani in Des Plaines, I’m pretty sure, isn’t going to help a thirsty Indian any more than cleaning your plate will help a starving African.

The United Nations deems water a basic human right.

“For every degree the temperature rises above fourteen C [57.2 Fahrenheit], sales of water increase by 5.2 percent. This means that at twenty-eight C [82.4 Fahrenheit] sales of water double.”

Her group called on Nestlé to “respect the right of local communities to exercise democratic control over the use of their water,”