The breaking news on bottled water suggests that it might not be the tall cool drink that ecofriendly, health-conscious consumers seek. Plastic bottles are piling up in landfills as billions of gallons of fossil fuels are used to ship the stuff worldwide. In the United States -- where half of Americans drink bottled water regularly, and one in six avoids the tap entirely -- consumers have been convinced that hitting the bottle is a healthy choice, even though the Environmental Protection Agency does a better job of monitoring what comes from home taps than the Food and Drug Administration does tracking water sold at the grocery store.

Less attention has been paid to another effect of branded water: It advances a corporate agenda to privatize public drinking supplies. 'Bottled water is getting people into the habit of paying an awful lot more for their drinking water,' says Tony Clarke, author of 'Inside the Bottle' (www.insidethebottle.org), a book-length expose of the industry published in 2005 by Canada's Polaris Institute and cited in Canadian Dimension (Jan./Feb. 2006). As much, in fact, as 10,000 times what they pay for tap water.

In 2003 the world's three largest for-profit water services corporations, France's Suez and Vivendi (now Veolia) and Germany's RWE-Thames, announced their goal to take control of 70 percent of U.S. and Canadian public water utilities within 10 years. By conditioning people to pay more for water than they do for gasoline, Clarke argues, the industry undermines confidence in public water utilities, setting the stage for privatization.

In communities that have privatized water services, prices have spiked and service often suffers. In 2003, after four years of rate hikes, dirty water, and service shutoffs, the mayor of Atlanta canceled the city's contract with Suez subsidiary United Water and announced that the government would resume running the system, and that it would be more efficient and reliable. In November, residents of Lexington, Kentucky, hope to pass a referendum that would reclaim public control of their privatized water utility, according to Stephanie Powell, an organizer with Green Corps, a national group assisting with the effort.