Pour Choice

Restaurants make money on it; consumers drink it up; but the environment has a tough time with bottled waters

If you could rack up frequent-flyer miles on ships, trains and trucks, a little square plastic bottle of Fiji water would be eligible for some big-time rewards.

Fiji hails from the island of Viti Levu in the South Pacific. That’s about 5,600 miles, as the crow flies, to the port of Los Angeles and another 3,000 or so to East Coast restaurant tables and home fridges.
Voss water is equally peripatetic, journeying from a place called Aust-Agderin, Norway, just south of the North Pole. A bird flying from there to L.A. would travel about 5,400 miles. The ships that cart the stuff to our shores travel farther.

San Pellegrino (also called Pellegrino) travels some 10,000 miles from Italy. And Ty Nant water, in the flashy cobalt blue bottle, covers more than 5,300 miles from the middle of Wales in the U.K. However, the bottles, which according to a West Coast importer have been made in Germany, voyage some 600 miles before they even get to Wales to be filled.

Though it’s hard to calculate the exact environmental costs of bottled water moving around the globe, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has taken a crack at a number: The amount of carbon dioxide emitted annually during the transportation to California of bottled water from France, Italy and Fiji accounts for an estimated 9,700 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the equivalent of the yearly emissions from 1,700 cars on the road.

San Diego Union-Tribune