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of the University of Central Florida’s new stadium on a sweltering day in 2007. The stadium had been built without any water fountains, a fact discovered by fans when concession stands ran out of the Dasani they’d been selling at $3 a bottle. Some sixty people ended up suffering from heat exhaustion as a result of dehydration; eighteen were sent to the hospital. Initially, school officials apologized by handing out a free bottle of Dasani to each ticket holder at the next game; after widespread fan outrage, however, they eventually agreed to install fifty water fountains, an amenity that had somehow previously escaped their minds.

Incidents such as these, coupled with the Tap Water Challenges, turned awareness of bottled water’s environmental consequences into a full-fledged backlash—driven by the unlikely champions of those most responsible for tap water’s production: U.S. mayors. Sick of being criticized about the water quality of their cities, mayors began canceling city contracts with bottled water companies and even began reinstalling water fountains in their city halls. Taking the issue further, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took a resolution to the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June 2007 that would commit all member cities to phase out bottled water at municipal buildings and events. Joining him to cosponsor the resolution were two mayors from more conservative political territory: Salt Lake City’s Rocky Anderson and Minneapolis’s R.T. Rybak. When the American Beverage Association, led by Coke, showed up to lobby aggressively against its adoption, arguing that it was only the first step in banning bottled water citywide—a direct affront to capitalism—their efforts backfired. While the mayors stopped short of passing a resolution encouraging members to ban bottled water, they did approve a resolution to study the issue and its effects on municipal trash systems. More surprisingly, the study actually occurred, and a year later, resulted in passage of the earlier, tougher call for a ban.

By then, more than sixty cities has already joined the backlash, with Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Austin, and Providence all either canceling bottled water contracts or instructing city departments not to buy bottled water. At the same time, restaurants moved to take bottled water off their menus, starting with chef Alice Waters, the godmother of “California cuisine,” who nixed bottled water from her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse in March 2007. Soon after, Food Network favorite Mario Batali followed suit at his empire of restaurants, including Manhattan’s swish Del Posto.

If the summer of 2003 was the season that childhood obesity exploded into public view, the summer of 2007 was the season the United States woke up to bottled water. Even The Economist has called the success of bottled water “one of capitalism’s greatest mysteries” in an online editorial in July 2007, conjuring the patent medicine era by calling it the new “snake oil.” Kellett remembers the exact day when she realized CAI had won—July 15, 2007. While organizing a day to call in to Pepsi’s corporate headquarters, she was taken aback by a strange playback message saying executives were meeting to determine how to respond to activist concerns—a response CAI hadn’t heard in decades of organizing.

Finally at the end of the day, Pepsi declared that, from then on, it would label Aquafina with the words “public water source,” identifying its origins from municipal sources. If it had hoped through the action to stave off further criticism, it failed. Within two days, the activists were doing round-the-clock interviews with every major television and news organization to talk about how not only Pepsi, but also Coke, sourced its water from the tap.

Within just a few years, bottled water had gone from trendy to gauche. In the fall of 2007, CAI began circulating a “Think Outside the Bottle” pledge, asking people to drink public water over bottled water whenever possible. Within just a few weeks, it signed on several thousand people, celebrities among