You will hear an interview. Mr. Darcy is an interviewer. Elizabeth Royte is the writer of a book called Bottlemania: How Water W

Man: Once upon a time we all just used to drink water but now we’re all participants in a multibillion dollar industry. It is the subject of a new book by Elizabeth Royte called Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. Elizabeth is here to talk about her book. Welcome, Elizabeth.
Woman: Thanks, Mr. Darcy.
Man: OK. You and I... At least I’m old enough to remember-just opening up a tap and drinking a glass of water. What happened? And when did it start?
Woman: Well, it started in 1977 when Perrier, the French carbonated water, came over the Ocean and it was a big hit in urban markets with the certain demographics...
Man: Those were the little bottles.
Woman: Little glass bottles. Right. And it was very popular in niche market. People were walking on the street sipping from Perrier at that point. There was a kind of big, boring innovation in 1989 when it became possible to put water in light-weighted, cheap, crystal-clear plastic bottles made of PET plastics. That’s when the market really took off. In 1990. bottled water was a 115-million-dollar business. In 2007. it’s worth 15 billion dollars in this country.
Man: OK, Elizabeth. So these little bottled water caught on and became something huge. How did that happen?
Woman: Well, that happened in the 90s when Coke and Pepsi got into the game. They were taking a lot of the pop shots for selling soda to kids and these high calorie drinks. There was an obesity epidemic. And they saw their market share dropping so came up with their own waters.
Woman: Coke came up with Dasani: Pepsi came up with Aquafina and they have these very complicated. elaborate distributing networks and...
Woman: ...they have tens of million dollars to spend on advertising.
Man: So they have the system in place to distribute and market huge quantity of bottled water.
Woman: Exactly. They have a very smart idea of telling us we need to drink eight-ounce of water a day and do a lot of Yoga.
Man: That was their idea?
Woman: Yeah. Well, many people have this idea but they all capitalise on this aspirations of ours, that everyone uses a Yoga model to sell their waters and part of beautiful, healthy lifestyle is to have your own plastic bottle of water.
Man: And your book describes what goes in to make those waters... the filtering process — is a little different from tap water.
Woman: Oh, sure. It is very different. But there are couples of different kinds of bottled water. The Aquafina and the Dasani are made from municipal water and they’re very filtered and then they’re going to bottles. They are not run through city pipes like our tap water. But then there is the spring water — the Poland Springs, the Arrowhead, Zephyr Hills that actually do come from springs in the protected areas, some of them in the woods. And those don’t go through all those filtering because they won’t be spring water anymore. You’ll be stripping out all those tasty minerals that people like.
Man: Now, Elizabeth, we all like to drink this water. Many of us do. But it also has an effect on the environment which you discuss in some details in your book.
Woman: Right. I write about the backlash that started about a year ago when people started to think about that carbon footprint of the water bottles. And people made much amount of the oil to make the bottles, urn, 17 million barrels of oil to make bottles just to use in the U.S. and that’s not even counting all the oil taken to transport them, to chill the water, and then to pick up and dispose those bottles when people are done with them.