Inside the Bottle: Exposing the Bottled Water Industry

• Tony Clarke
• Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives; July 2007 (2nd edition)
• Paperback; 216 pages
• 978-088627-536-5

Inside the Bottle provides a vivid and disturbing portrayal of how four big companies – Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Danone – dominate the bottled water industry and examines key issues of public concern about their operations, including how they:

* pay little or nothing for the water they take from rural springs or public systems;
* turn ‘water’ into ‘water’ through elaborate treatment processes;
* produce a product that is not necessarily safer then, nor as regulated as, tap water;
* package it in plastic bottles made of environmentally destructive toxic chemicals;
* market it to an unsuspecting public as ‘pure, healthy, safe drinking water’; and
* sell it at prices hundreds, even thousands of times more costly than ordinary tap water.

Tony Clarke is director of the Polaris Institute and author of nine critically acclaimed books including Blue Gold: The Battle Against the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water [with Maude Barlow], now published in 40 countries.