elizabeth - The Environment Report

Transcript

We buy a lot of bottled water.
Globally, sales are more than 60-billion
dollars a year. Elizabeth Royte just wrote
a new book about the whole bottled water
phenomenon. It’s called ‘Bottlemania’.
The Environment Report’s Lester Graham
asked her how we got to where we’re carrying
a plastic bottle of water with us at all times:

Elizabeth Royte: “Because of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on advertising telling us that
bottled water is pure and natural, will make us look better, and make us more attractive to the
opposite sex. If you’re smart, you’ll drink bottled water.”

Lester Graham: (laughs) “Okay, so at $1.39 a pint, it sounds like I’m paying for a lot of advertising
and not much water.”

Royte: (laughs) “Yeah. You’re paying for advertising, you’re paying for lawyers, you’re paying for
PR flacks, you’re paying for the right to extract water from communities where many people might
not. So there’s a lot of legal battles going on over it, so some of your money may be going toward
that. You’ll be doing your pocketbook and the environment a big favor by just getting a good
refillable, reusable, washable bottle and filling it up with good old tap water.”

Graham: “A lot of bottled water comes from public water supplies. Dasani and Aquafina, from
Coke and Pepsi, come from public water supplies, and, as you say in ‘Bottlemania’, ‘they filter the
bejesus out of it’. Other water comes from natural springs, or glaciers, or pure mountain rivers –
doesn’t that make it better?”

Royte: “Well, you’ve hit on it, because that’s what they’re trading on and sometimes they charge a
bit more from that. They do say it is a natural product – it’s coming from the Earth. Those other
brands, Aquafina and Dasani, do start from municipal water supplies, they’re very filtered. And if
you don’t want to have minerals in your water, then you should aim for one of those. Or, get a
reverse-osmosis filter and install it under your sink and you’ll get the same thing, more or less.”

Graham: “Okay, so I’ve been buying bottled water by the case, let’s say. You want me to stop
buying bottled water because there’s fuel used in it, there’s petroleum used in the plastic, I’m
paying more than I should have to for water. What should I do?”

Royte: “You shouldn’t buy bottled water for bad reasons. You should educate yourself. You
should find out what’s going on upstream, what’s going on in your watershed, what sort of industry,
agriculture, development. Read your consumer confidence report. Know the utility is found in the
water, then go a step further, and order up some of your own tests so you can find out what’s in the
pipes in your house. Because the utility is responsible for the quality of the water only until it gets
to your service lines.”

Graham: “But that’s a lot of work. It’s easier to buy a bottle of water.”

Royte: (laughs) “It’s easier in the short run, but it’s going to hurt you financially in the long run, and
its contributing to climate change. That’s the carbon footprint of the transportation, the making the
bottles, the landfills, the incinerator, the litter – it goes on and on and on. It is a little bit of money
up front. But it’s only up front. You’ll get that reusable bottle, you might have to get a filter, but
again, you’re going to save money buying this filter and maintaining it over relying only on bottled
water.”

Graham: “So, let’s say you go to lunch or go to meet someone for coffee and your friend comes in
with a plastic bottle of water they bought at a local store. Do you resist the urge to say, ‘hey, do
you know?’ or do you go ahead and let them have it. Let me hear your elevator speech to your
friend.”

Royte: (laughs) “I don’t have friends like that.” (laughs) “All my friends have refillable, reusable
bottles.” (laughs) “No, yeah, I sometimes do resist the urge. I do see people in their cars with
these bottles and I don’t say anything because I want to keep them as friends. But I try to model
good behavior, and they see me filling up my bottle, and I hope some of that rubs off on them.”

Elizabeth Royte is the
author of ‘Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale
And Why We Bought It’. She spoke with Lester Graham.

Logs from ash trees that had to be cut down after they were infested with emerald ash borer beetles. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
An adult emerald ash borer. (Photo courtesy of Michigan Department of Agriculture)

In more and more places, you can’t bring firewood with you when you go
camping. That’s because officials are worried about a destructive
beetle that people are spreading by moving firewood all over the
nation. Scientists say the best thing you can do is buy firewood where
you camp. But as Rebecca Williams reports, even then… you can’t
always know if the wood you’re buying is safe:

Transcript

(Sound of crackling fire)

There’s something sort of magical about a fire. Without it, there’d be
no roasted marshmallows, no ghost stories. And it would get pretty cold at
night. That’s why a lot of people toss some firewood in their car on
the way to camp out. It’s just habit.

But lately it’s gotten risky to move firewood. That wood could be
carrying tiny stowaways with big appetites. Especially a metallic
green beetle called the emerald ash borer.

The ash borer eats through the living layer of ash trees, so the trees
starve to death. It’s thought to have gotten into the States in wood
packing material from China. So far, it’s killed more than 20 million
ash trees in the upper Midwest and Ontario. That’s costing
millions of dollars in lost trees and wood.

People can move the beetle long distances unknowingly by moving
firewood, because the bug hides underneath the bark.

Elizabeth Pentico is trying to stop people from moving that infested
wood. She’s with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She supervises
USDA inspectors looking for people moving firewood out of quarantined
states:

“If someone has a shipment of logs that’s fairly easy to see, but 25
pieces of firewood in the back of a pickup truck with a camper is a
whole different issue. The firewood pathway is very difficult because
it is so low profile and because everyone moves firewood.”

Pentico says the best thing to do is buy firewood locally… and burn it
all up. But she says a lot of times, if you buy it from a gas station,
supermarket, or home improvement store, there won’t be any way to know
for sure if the firewood is safe.

Recently, that’s been a problem. Firewood from a company in Illinois
was shipped to Menard’s home improvement stores in 10 states. Illinois
is under a federal quarantine for emerald ash borer. So no hardwood
firewood can cross state lines, unless it’s been treated to kill
emerald ash borer larvae.

But somebody messed up.

Jane Larson is a spokesperson with the Wisconsin Department of
Agriculture. She says in this case, the firewood company had an
agreement with the federal government to ship firewood across state
lines:

“Part of that agreement is they’d sell wood that had the bark removed,
or it would be ‘debarked.’ And we were finding here that the wood was not
debarked.”

Larson says a nationwide recall was put in place. But she says a few
Menard’s stores were still selling the firewood a week after the recall
notice was issued.

In a written statement to The Environment Report, a Menard’s
spokesperson says quote – “Menard’s was in complete cooperation with
the USDA firewood recall and has obtained a new vendor.”

But officials say this incident shows how easily the ash borer can
spread.

USDA’s Elizabeth Pentico says even if you buy a firewood
bundle that says it’s from Texas, that doesn’t mean that’s where the
firewood came from:

“We had a distribution center here in Michigan. The broker for the
firewood was in Texas. The wood itself came out of Missouri and the
wood was distributed to Ohio and Indiana.”

So you can see, firewood can travel around a lot.

You can even buy firewood on eBay, by the semi-load. Pentico says her
inspectors have to watch the Net closely:

“They’ve even come across some firewood chatrooms that have firewood sales.
You can indicate that firewood is illegal. The officers stopped a sale
of Michigan firewood going to California by just typing in and saying
you know, that’s an illegal movement.”

But Pentico says officers do have to catch the wood actually crossing
state lines before the laws can be enforced.

Some people in the firewood industry agree it’s like hide and seek for
inspectors.

Jim Albring is a firewood dealer who’s been in the business for more
than 25 years:

“A lot of firewood business is done by little individuals, guys that
cut on the weekends and so forth, and you try to change the mindset of those people
and say you can’t cut ash, you can’t sell ash, well they’re going to
cut what they want to cut. They’re individuals… and if there’s ash in
it, so there’s ash in it.”

The inspectors say it’s very hard even for a trained eye to tell the
difference between ash wood that might be infested and any other kind
of wood that’s safe. So they say the best thing to do is to not move
firewood at all. Buy local and burn it up as soon as you can.

For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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