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Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water

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How and why branded bottles of water have insinuated themselves into our daily lives, and what the implications are for safe urban water supplies.

How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become an economic good—no longer a common resource but a commercial product, in industry parlance a “fast moving consumer good,” or FMCG? Plastic Water examines the processes behind this transformation. It goes beyond the usual political and environmental critiques of bottled water to investigate its multiplicity, examining a bottle of water's simultaneous existence as, among other things, a product, personal health resource, object of boycotts, and part of accumulating waste matter. Throughout, the book focuses on the ontological dimensions of drinking bottled water—the ways in which this habit enacts new relations and meanings that may interfere with other drinking water practices.

The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 2015

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About the author

Gay Hawkins

12 books3 followers
Gay Hawkins is Research Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney.

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for Peter.
83 reviews1 follower
June 12, 2016
Probably an important book, but I was put off by the arcane philosophical jargon. Turns out I care much more about the politics, economics, environmental impacts and psychology behind bottled water than I do about the "ontology." I have little appetite for gratuitous and baroque language - taking a paragraph to express what could be conveyed in a sentence or two. I learned about two dozen new words, but I'm not sure it was worth the trouble.

(Here are some of the words: agencement, semiotics, teleological, reticulated, actant, transpire (v.t.), imaginaries, performativity, calculable, qualification (the process of imbuing quality), indexical, biopolitical, habitus, prehension, concrescence, imbrication, teleology.)

I had intended to include an absurd quote from page 41, or another from page 140, but I'm now past the point of wanting to expend any additional effort on this book. Look them up yourself.
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