Back Talk: Elizabeth Royte

In 2007 we drank about 50 billion bottles of water in the United States. It takes 17 million barrels of oil to make all the bottles we use in this country [for water], and the making of those bottles generates 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. The backlash against bottled water in 2007 wasn’t about the water or privatization or pollution or any of that–it was about the carbon. It was all about oil.
[A man passes on the street with two bottles of Fiji water in his handcart.] Fiji water. How can anyone walk around with that now? Fiji has become the poster child of the carbon footprint. It comes 5,000 miles over the ocean, and then it goes onto trucks. I mean, I desperately would love to taste Fiji water, because everyone says it’s really good and really different, but I can’t buy it. To me that’s like a Hummer.

The Nation