Lapping it up

IN 2006, Americans consumed, per capita, more than 25 gallons of bottled water -- twice as much as in 1997 and almost five times as much as in 1987. And what ignites Elizabeth Royte's reportorial spark in "Bottlemania" -- at least initially -- is the ecological cost of all those plastic empties: We discard between 30 billion and 40 billion bottles of Poland Spring, the most popular brand, in a year.

Like her previous book, "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash," this tautly paced volume more closely resembles a travel narrative than a tree-hugging jeremiad. Royte doesn't traffic in platitudes, moral certainties or oversimplification; she's unafraid of ambiguity. Seamlessly blending scientific explanation and social observation, she pursues the course of Poland Spring back to its source in Fryeburg, Maine.

"Fryeburg is tied up in fits," she writes. "Its abundance of fine water has cast its unwitting residents into the middle of a social, economic, and environmental drama." Her mordant wit comes in handy: "It's easier to picture kids guzzling beer out here than deer nuzzling around mossy springs," she notes. "But Fryeburg, for all its out-of-season torpor, once bustled with economic activity: sawmills and timber operations, a shoe manufacturing plant, a couple of machine shops, corn shops, and dozens of thriving dairy farms. Now, it has the water-extraction business, which contributes nothing to the town's long-term economic welfare."

What drives this obsessive thirst -- this compulsion to pay for something we can essentially get for free? Royte characterizes the nationwide craving for bottled water, "in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations," as both an outrageous marketing coup and an unparalleled social phenomenon. Beginning in the late 1970s with Orson Welles' high-toned television pitches for Perrier, bottled water has been promoted for its snob appeal as much as its health benefits. Jennifer Aniston's recent spots for Smartwater strike Royte as typically absurd. "Some ads depict her naked and others place her, clad, in an elegant restaurant, where her plastic water bottle looks, to someone with my peculiar mindset, like litter amid the crystal stemware."