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potentially climactic turn when Nestlé Waters Canada, in late 2008, placed a full-page ad in the Toronto Globe and Mail calling bottled water “the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world,” as measured by its water, plastic, and carbon footprints. Instantly, the Council of Canadians, the Polaris Institute, and several other environmental organizations filed a complaint, under the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards, that Nestlé was trying to mislead the public. In a tête-à-tête during the Toronto vote on banning the sale of bottled water in that city’s buildings, Nestlé’s John B. Challinor told the Polaris Institute’s Joe Cressy that if his group didn’t withdraw its complaint, he’d discredit Polaris (Challinor’s language was reportedly much more colorful, but this is the gist). In January 2009, the Advertising Council of Canada declined to hear the case, bizarrely claiming that the publicity it had received breached “the confidentiality of the proceedings.” Polaris is now challenging that ruling.

As the tide of bad publicity swelled and the economy swooned, bottlers were beginning to state unequivocally that their product was better than the far more affordable alternative. In an interview with Advertising Age, Nestlé Waters North America CEO Kim Jeffery said his company was “guaranteeing that product, when you open it up, is high quality. You can’t make that guarantee for tap water that’s coming through an infrastructure that’s as much as 100 years old,” as it is in many U.S. cities. The gloves had come off.

Many have asked me how Nestlé responded to this book. The short answer: praise for raising important issues, condemnation for focusing on Fryeburg—an atypical situation, they say. (The company’s response can be seen at www.nestle-watersna.com/pdf/Nestle-Waters-Response-to-Bottlemania-062008.pdf.) Thanks to Nestlé, I’ve emended in subsequent editions the price the company pays for water in Fryeburg and the funding source for an aquifer study. I stand by my other reporting and opinions. Spurred by scrupulous readers, I’ve made other minor non-Nestlé-related corrections as well. Relations with my Nestlé contacts remain cordial: The company’s director of corporate citizenship wrote me that the book has “helped inform our evolution to broader environmental and social sustainability.”

So this is good. But the company continues—as companies do—to expand its market share, pursuing new spring sources around the country. Sometimes Nestlé’s tactics are heavy-handed (it threatened to sue Miami-Dade County if it didn’t pull public service messages promoting tap water over bottled). And its message—“we’re a good neighbor”—often clashes with its behavior (repeatedly suing Fryeburg, for example). For the Miami caper, Co-Op America named Nestlé Waters chairman and CEO John J. Harris “one of the four worst corporate scrooges of 2008.”

Inadvertently, and doubtless to the dismay of Nestlé executives, the legal tussling in Fryeburg has made that town an Alamo for Nestlé resistors nationwide, galvanizing them against the company. In March 2009, following four years of acrimonious debate that ricocheted from the crossroads of Fryeburg into the national media, Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Nestlé was entitled to a permit for its proposed tanker station in that town. (The review of this facility, where springwater pumped from the adjacent town of Denmark would be loaded into tanker trucks, included two planning-board decisions, two board-of-appeals decisions, and two rounds in Superior Court.) It’s important to note that the court’s decision hinged on the wording of Fryeburg’s comprehensive plan—a legal loophole, said the attorney representing Nestlé opponents—and not on who has the right to pump water. Jamilla El-Shafei, the founder of Save Our Water in Maine, said the case “strengthens our convictions that every community must pass ordinances to protect both their natural resources and their right to decide for themselves if they want to do business with any corporate suitor.” Jim Wilfong, a former