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Interview with Elizabeth Royte, Author of Garbage Land and Bottlemania
In this interview, Elizabeth Royte (a freelance writer reporting on science and the environment) shares highlights from two of her books I really enjoyed - Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. I highly recommend these books to people who enjoy books such as “Fast Food Nation” or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” that combine nuanced and thoughtful investigation into our lifestyles with wonderful storytelling.
Elizabeth Royte’s books show that great storytelling can engage people in wanting to know more about industries that you might not think are interesting - like garbage and bottled water, which are fascinating, by the way.
Everyone enjoys a great story. Are you using great storytelling in your business?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- The adventures of tracking the truth about our trash - sneaking over fences & paddling away from police
- The “business model” of being an environmental journalist and writer
- How tansparent business practices often lead to healthier business practices for people and planet
- The social, environmental, and political implications of the bottled water that you buy
- The real issue with landfills, and where most waste actually comes from
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Patrick from Green Business Innovators, and today I’m going to be talking with Elizabeth Royte about two terrific books that she’s written. One is about the business of bottled water and the other is about the business about garbage.
One thing I liked about the books is that they use what I would call investigative storytelling. Because they combine deep investigation into the environmental impacts of business and consumer behavior. And they also have captivating personal stories. I’ve seen great reviews of these books in the media, on sites such as the New York Times website, the LA Times, Salon, Treehugger and so forth. Fortunately the news media are giving attention to these books so that more people can get exposed to that fascinating information that these books have. I found both books to be inspirational and really a tremendous personal call to action in terms of my own life. Welcome Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Elizabeth, what was your motive for writing these kinds of books? There’s a lot of things you could be writing about. Why these topics?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: I think I write about the environment because I care deeply about the environment, and I’m interested in all kinds of science topics, learning about how the world works and I used to write a lot about conservation and people doing work with animals and plants and things.
Actually, my first book was about rain forest scientists, but my interests have sort of shifted with the garbage book to the human part of the equation and what people are doing to the environment. And the garbage book followed where garbage went, all kinds of all different types of garbage, after they left us. And research on that book led into the bottled water book because I started to see all these plastic bottles lying around and I saw them as disposable single use packaging and I wondered how we had gotten to this point. I’m now in this niche of writing about what we as consumers are doing to the world around us.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: It sounds to me that you’re able to write books that are selling that are about topics that you have a personal passion for.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yes. I guess the other part I didn’t really finish my answer. I do have a personal interest in all this, and it happens to coincide with many other people’s interests as we become more aware of how the climate is changing and what that’s doing [to the environment]. People care more about what they can do to change this. And I feel like I’m writing on important topics. I’m interested in other things also, but I think this is an area where I can have a lot of influence. And I hear from people almost daily with phone calls and e-mails and things that my books have affected them, and they’ve changed the way they think and they have changed the way they buy.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s really interesting. That leads into the next question I have for you actually, which is do you have a sense of the influence that your books are having, and do you have a sense that writing these kind of books are helping to change the situation?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yeah. I can say that I think that I am changing some people’s thoughts and habits, and I didn’t set out to do that. I mean I wanted to raise awareness, but it’s been tremendously gratifying to have all of this feedback. And of course the people who hate my books and don’t agree with them or think that I’m way off base are probably not writing to me. This is a self-selected kind of group that is telling me that they love my books and they have never thought about garbage the same way since they’ve read Garbageland or they’ve given up bottled water. So I do, just because of the volume of the stuff that I get. People who are teachers getting in touch with me, and teachers are very powerful people, and they’re working with young people and they’re teaching them from my book. Yes, I think I’m having an impact.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Well, that’s great to hear because there is obviously a really great need for education about how our personal actions are affecting the environment. Are you hearing from any sort of opposition groups or pressure groups regarding your books? Is someone trying to respond to the books in a different way and present a different message out there? Have you seen a kind of an opposition?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: They’re not contacting me directly, but with the water book I can see the bottled water companies are very much on the defensive against books like mine, but also other pressure groups who are going out there and making a lot of noise and trying to get people to switch away from bottled water. They’re making some changes in their packaging of the water, and they’re getting more involved in recycling. That’s a positive affect. They are countering some of the activist charges, but they haven’t contacted me directly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay. A question that I have that I think could be useful for people out there who are possibly enterprising new authors. Could you tell us how authors of books like these make a living? Is it from royalties? Or is it a fixed amount from the publisher? What are the economics of being a writer?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: There haven’t been any royalties yet. It’s a very meager living. When I write books, I write a book proposal and then I sell the proposal and get an advance. And writers don’t make royalties until they earn back their advances. But I also write magazine stories because I like to write and I don’t come up with book ideas that often, and I also go around speaking at colleges and that’s another small income. You sort of piece it altogether.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay. Now let’s turn the discussion to the books themselves. Could you tell us about your most recent book which is called Bottlemania, how water went on sale and why we bought it?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Bottlemania, as I said before, I started getting interested in bottled water from the packaging side from a waste perspective of garbage or waste and wondered how we got to this point where Americans go through 50 billion plastic water bottles a year.
But, I realized I couldn’t find out why and how bottled water had become so popular without also looking at tap water. A great deal of the book deals with what’s right or wrong with tap water, and ultimately it is a plea for protecting municipal water supplies. Not shifting over if we learned scary things about tap water and all tap water is not perfect, but as I say in the book, it is the devil, we know, and it’s the devil we have standing to negotiate with and to improve.
And if we continue to move toward bottled water and fully one-fifth of the American population drinks only bottle water, we’re going to have very little political support and financial support for these systems. And we need that support to raise rates and approve bond issues to protect water sheds and upgrade treatment plants to remove the contaminants we continue to find in municipal water supplies and to fix our pipes.
We have a big infrastructure problem in this country. The book is really quite broad, and I feel like anyone who drinks water should read this book and learn about what’s in their tap water, what they do to protect themselves if they feel that they need to. Most tap water in this country is absolutely fine to drink straight from the tap. And to know what the environmental and social toll of bottled water is, and then to make an informed choice what you want to drink.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Could you give us a sense of, if you take it in the aggregate, what is the impact of selling water in bottles?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: There is a significant carbon impact. It takes 17 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles we go through in the United States each year. And making those bottles generates 2 ½ million tons of carbon dioxide.
It also takes enormous amounts of oil or oils equivalent to transport the water from springs, if it’s coming from a spring source to bottling plants and then distributed all over the country. Some bottle water is coming from 5 thousand miles across the ocean from Fiji or from Norway or from New Zealand. There’s an oil impact of all this transportation and then going around collecting the empties.
I don’t talk too much about the water footprint. There’s a lot of extra water to make bottled water, you need a lot more water to wash the bottling plants and things like that. And to make the bottles and cool the equipment, but it is true, making soda bottles has even more of a water impact. To me, that’s not a big deal. Except that bottled water in many cases is redundant to what comes out of the tap and I think that anyone interested in lightening the impact on the earth, if they find out through there own testing that their tap water is perfectly healthy to drink why wouldn’t you try to steer away from bottled water and get a good refillable bottle.
Those are some of the environmental impacts, and then as I said before, these political impacts of abandoning municipal supplies and then there’s a social impact on some of these towns that have said, no they don’t want their spring water bottled. They worry about the water table or the environment changing with the spring water pumping. They worry about the trucks in the town and they just worry about having control over a resource that they need, that’s a necessity to their life. They live in these water sheds. They want to control the water. They don’t want to see it moved away. There’s social, political and environmental impact.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s one of the things I read in your book is that water supplies are starting to dry up in many parts of the U.S. Is there anything that can be done about that?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Well, water supplies… we have had an 8-year drought in the Southwest. We had a drought in the Southeast last year. But they are not because of bottled water pumping. We’re over-pumping aquifers for irrigation and for industry, but agriculture really is the largest user of ground water.
What can we do about that, we can conserve water; we can price water more accurately. We have a lot of water subsidies in this country that encourage growers to grow things that maybe they shouldn’t in arid areas. But my book really does focus on personal water. The bottle that you have on your desk right now, as you’re talking to me, maybe.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay. Actually, I do have a glass of water from the tap right in front of me.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Excellent. Okay.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And speaking of, your book does talk about some options such as using Brita filters and Sigg metal bottles and not using Nalgene. Can you tell us about what recommendations you would have and what practices you’re using in your life right now?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Sure. I’m using a simple pour-through counter top filter. I know that it’s not removing, if I had some serious contaminants in the water (agricultural herbicides, pesticides or industrial contaminants) the Brita would not be removing them, but I don’t have those in my water and I know because I tested it.
I use this pour-through filter to remove the chlorine smell faster. I could use nothing and the chlorine would off gas or evaporate overnight, but I drink a lot of water and so it’s just faster to put it through that filter, and whenever I leave the house, I bring my Sigg bottle with me. It’s made of aluminum with an enamel lining that so far hasn’t been accused of leeching any chemicals into the water. I have old Nalgenes that I use. The older ones do have a plasticizer in them called Bisphenol A, which some people think is linked with endocrine disruption and birth defects. The new Nalgenes, if you bought a Nalgene today, it would not have Bisphenol in it. I don’t want to steer people a way from these new bottles.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And I have actually read some blog posts recently questioning enamel lining inside the Sigg containers.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Oh no.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I’m not sure what the conclusion is but…
ELIZABETH ROYTE: The company says, and how companies like to defend their products, but they say that there are no leeching chemicals from their food grade enamel lining. We’ll see.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes, we’ll find out, I’m sure. One other counter arguments I’ve heard to the use of bottled water is that the bottle can be recycled. One of the things I read in your book is that the national recycling rate or reuse rate of the bottles from bottled water is only 17%.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yes, very few of those bottles make there way into recycling systems. Part of the problem is that people grab this water and go, and they don’t like to hang on to their empties if they’re driving or they’re biking or whatever.
They don’t hang on to them until they find a blue bin or a recycling bin to put them in, and so they get put into regular trash or they get littered. And we have a huge litter problem in this country and these bottles are very light and they blow around and they work their way into waterways that lead to rivers that lead to the ocean and we’ve got the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has filled with plastic liter debris that has photo degraded into tiny little pieces they call nerdles.
We need to make it easier for people to recycle and to educate people to tell them how important it is to get the bottles back into recycling systems. Also, bottle bills would go a long way toward helping that. The states with bottle bills and they’re only 11 of them, recycle these containers at three times the rate of non-bottled bill states. But…
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And what, what is a bottle bill?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: A bottle bill is a container deposit law where when you buy a soda or a beer you pay a nickel extra or a dime and when you return the empty container you get that money back. And people do bring those bottles back in those states, but only 2 of the 11 states their bottle bills cover water bottles and ice teas and sports drinks, so we need to expand the bottle bill in the states that have them to cover water bottles and to pass bottle bills in the states that don’t have any.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Well, that would make sense especially now that water is such a big selling item.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yeah. We drink more water than beer or milk in this country now.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And I think I read in your book that bottled water is the best selling item period at Whole Foods.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yes. At the time I wrote that it was true and I do not know if it’s true now. I have not heard back from Whole Foods with recent inquiries. I would like to know if the backlash that we’ve seen in the last year has hit Whole Foods. I mean part of the backlash or the decline in bottle water sales is because of the economy. But I don’t know if as a category at Whole Foods that’s declined.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay. Elizabeth is there one piece of information about water aside from what we’ve discussed that you wish everyone in the U.S. could know about?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: One piece of information. I wish people would understand that bottled water has an environmental, social and political impact and that they should learn what’s going on with their tap water and if their tap water is fine, I wish that they would think twice before buying a bottle of something that may be redundant until it’s coming out of the tap.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: One thing I really liked about your book, Elizabeth, was it’s very nuanced, and it’s not a black and white sort of book. And when you told the story about Fiji water, and Fiji water is being imported from a very distant place, but yet the Fiji Water Company itself is having is making some positive impact on the communities where the water is produced. There does always seem to be two sides to the story, and one of the things I liked about your book is it does endeavor to tell both sides of every story.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yeah, it does. I think there’s more than two sides, there’s three and four, which made this book so complicated. That the tap water situation isn’t black and white and neither is the bottled water situation black and white.
There are times when bottled water certainly is appropriate in emergencies and for people who cannot drink even filtered water because of their health, and yes, Fiji water is coming 5,000 miles and then getting on trucks and going across the ocean, but a lot of that money is going back into the community. And they really need this money in Fiji to improve their own water infrastructure, which is in poor shape.
You do need to look at all sides of it. And the whole issue has been very polarized by the media and by advocacy groups and the bottled water makers themselves. I hope to fill in some those spaces between those poles.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes, I found that the book is just chock-full of very interesting information about water.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Now, let’s turn to your previous book which was Garbageland. My impression is most people would probably rather not know where their garbage goes and are happy that it magically disappears every week when trash collector comes. Elizabeth, why did you want to know more about where garbage goes?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Because I wasn’t one of those people who would rather not know. I always want to know where things are going and where they’re coming from, and I think a lot of people in the back of their minds are just a little bit curious to know.
I think people shouldn’t live with their head in the sand. They should know that the toll that our choices make on the world. I was curious to know where my garbage went, but then I had a kind of galvanizing experience. I was canoeing with my young daughter on a canal in Brooklyn, a very dirty and industrial waterway, and I was pointing out to her features of the natural world, the plants and birds, and naming things.
But then, I started pointing out other stuff that was in the canal and I noticed these 5 different streams of waste, household waste, organic waste, all the different streams of recycling household hazardous waste and even sewage, which is another stream that I paid attention to in that book.
And I realized that I got rid of all this stuff, not always daily with the hazardous stuff, but I might’ve been responsible for some of this stuff and that gave me this idea that I could follow the different streams of waste and my book would take the form of adventure travel, which is something I was familiar with from writing for Outside Magazine.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: The book is full of eye-opening adventures into the land of garbage. Could you share one of your adventures with us?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Well, I followed my “sanman” around in the streets of New York, the sanitation workers, and they call themselves sanmen, even if they’re women. But they dump their trucks at a transfer station and then from the transfer station the garbage gets loaded into an 18-wheeler and in the hands of a private company, and this company brings it all the way across New York and across New Jersey to Pennsylvania. And I wanted to see where my garbage was actually being dumped in the landfill.
It was very difficult to arrange a tour of the place, the landfill manager didn’t want to talk to me, but I was very persistent, and I kept calling and calling, and he reluctantly agreed to show me the landfill. And I made my way out there, and it was a 3-hour drive, and when I met him he said, great, let’s go see the recycling, and I said no, that’s okay. My recycling doesn’t come here. I just want to see what you’re doing with putrecible waste– That is the word that is used for the stuff bound for landfill or an incinerator.
And he said, oh no, no, no I can’t show you that and it’s too dangerous. There’s liability issues, and I said, well, you told me on the phone that you’d give me a tour, and I explained my project, and I drove all this way, come on let’s go see it, I’ll sign any waivers you want and he was adamant; he would not let me go up to see where the trucks were dumping my trash.
And I was really annoyed and I drove away and I started circling the landfill looking for a way in on my own and the place was encircled by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, but eventually I saw a creek running out of the property and the water was kind of low and the fence was curled up over the creek. I hid my car in the woods and I snuck through the trees. I had this paranoid sense that there were cameras everywhere. I was sneaking in, and I crossed the stream on a log, and I wiggled under the fence, and I tried to creep on my belly through the grassy parts of the landfill, trying to get up to where the trash was being dumped.
But there were lots of switchbacks and trucks kept coming along, and then I’d have to hide in the grass and try a new angle of attack, and I realized that I would never get up to the active face without getting arrested. I retreated. I never did get to see my trash there. I visited other landfills. I paddled around Fresh Kills landfill in New York, which, when it was open, was the largest landfill in the world. But, that was difficult to visit, so I had to sneak in with another boater under a containment boom and under a fence, and we almost got arrested at that landfill, but we paddled away from the officer who was trying to arrest us and escaped him only to be caught by the turn of the tide.
I don’t know if you want to hear that whole story, but so following garbage was difficult. People didn’t want to talk to me, and they hung up on me or stood me up. I had to take matters into my own hands now and then.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Well, I want to go into that with an aside, which is… it seems that in both books it took a lot of effort and months of kind of pestering people for you to be able to see certain things. And one of the things I think about the book is, is the lack of transparency in so many industries.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yeah. The garbage world is pretty secretive, and I guess that’s why we came up with that subtitle “On the Secret Trail of Trash”. People on the West Coast were much more open to me visiting and showing me what they were doing. I think they’re very proud of what they were doing.
The East Coast is a little more old-fashioned, and I started wondering why there is so much secrecy in the waste world and I realized that they don’t have extra people around to show freelance writers around landfills, and they do have trucks working there, but I also realized that if people could see and understand the enormity of our wastefulness, that they might think twice about buying and then discarding things and that’s slowing the streaming of waste into landfills is not in the interests of people who own landfills and operate them.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: It seems like there’s a whole genre of books now, your two books and of course, Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma and so forth, where people are trying to kind of shed more light or provide more transparency on to things that are really important to us in our lives.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yeah. We’re looking at where our food comes from. Where our water comes from, where things go after they leave us. I think people like to feel connected to the natural world, and we’re realizing that we’re changing the natural world, and that it affects us. That everything we do is changing our air and it’s changing our water and the soil that grows our food and that’s what these books are looking at. The impact that we have never had to consider before.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Speaking of impact, why is reducing the amount of garbage generated important?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: It’s important not because we’re running out of landfill space, but because burying garbage in the ground isn’t a safe thing today. Landfills generate leechate, which is toxic soup filled with traces of all stuff that we’ve thrown in there like heavy metals and pesticides and solvents and landfill liners can leak and contaminate soil and water. They also offgas methane, they’re a major source of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.
Incinerators also emit; they do have very complicated scrubbers and screens, and they’re much cleaner than they used to be, but they still emit low levels of mercury, dioxin and lead which are working their way into the environment. And because of the mercury settling on waterways that we’re not suppose to be eating tuna fish more than once a week now. Our garbage is coming around to bite us.
But, there are other reasons I learned reporting the book to reduce our consumption and our waste and that’s because making the goods that we use for brief a time or for whatever amount of time, takes an enormous toll on the environment, and to understand that the best way, I would refer people to an incredible film called “The Story of Stuff” www.storyofstuff.com , which talks about the impact of mining raw materials, whether it’s oil or steel or other ores or timber, all the water it takes.
The energy it takes to do this mining, the toll it takes on the environment, transporting these raw materials, and then transforming them into consumer goods and shipping them to stores and then to individuals. The more we can reduce our consumption of new goods and reuse what’s already out there and recycle whatever we can, we’re cutting down on this enormous amount of waste upstream. And that’s a whole other topic. I would’ve wrote about down stream waste, but there’s so much more impact upstream before these consumer goods even get to us.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That might explain something I wanted to ask you about, which is I read in your book that only a small part of the municipal waste stream is from garbage from households.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Right. Yes.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I wanted to ask you, so then how would the recycling efforts of individuals make a difference?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Well, when we recycle, we not only put fewer things into holes in the ground, we reduce the need to mine and refine new raw materials. That’s where the big impact is. If we make new paper from old paper we’re cutting down fewer trees. If we make refrigerators and cars with scrap metal we’re not mining more ore from the ground.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That makes sense. What are some of the best things individuals can do to reduce garbage?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: I tell people to think about what kind of trash something is going to make before they even buy it. To ask themselves if its going to be toxic in the landfill or to people handling it, to ask themselves if they really need it and if they could perhaps buy it second hand or borrow it or rent it if it’s a piece of equipment they’re not going to be using very much. That’s about source reduction, just buying less stuff in general, and then there’s various things you can do to shrink the stuff you’re putting on the curb. Things like eliminating or at least vastly reducing your junk mail, going to catalogchoice.org to cancel the catalogs that you don’t want.
Composting is a huge thing that you can do to shrink your garbage footprint. According to the EPA 60 something % of what’s in landfills could potentially be composted, and it’s food scraps and it’s yard waste, leaves and grass clippings and it’s wood and it’s paper. There’s still and enormous amount of paper in landfills despite the thousands of paper recycling programs across the country.
We can be cutting our junk mail, yes composting, using durable products, avoiding single use packaging, like saying no to paper or plastic bags and using a reusable tote, saying no to bottled water, using a reusable bottle, taking your coffee mug with you, don’t get that coffee cup everyday. These are all small things, but if a lot of people do them and they them for long enough, I think it will have an impact.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This all makes sense. I think I was reading in your book that when we’re thinking about paper versus plastic, that’s a relatively small environmental impact compared to other aspects of human civilization at least in the west.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Yesa.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Is there anything you want to say to comment on that?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Oh, about the impact of bags?
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Or what are those things that really make an impact in terms of our lifestyle choices?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Throwing away electronics is a huge impact. Electronic waste is the fastest growing fraction of the household waste stream, and it’s TVs, it’s cell phones, it’s computers, it’s anything with a circuit board in it. And in many communities, well, most communities, it’s legal to put this stuff into your trash, but in a landfill it’s going to leech those heavy metals. Computers contain lead and cadmium and chromium and barium and all these metals that can leak out of a landfill, and when they go into incinerators those metals, some of them are trapped and go into the ash, but the ash then goes into a landfill and some of those metals come out the stack.
Sort of a sorry sad story but many computers that are brought to community recycling events by people with the best of intentions are actually being bundled up and sold to people in China and Africa, and they’re being processed by people with very few environmental safeguards and no safety gear, and they’re ending up with high levels of lead in their soil, and barium and chromium in their soil poisoning their water. Our electronic waste is having a huge impact.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: At this point, Elizabeth, is there anything else you would like to share about either one of your books with our listeners?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: They should know that these books contain some personal narrative, they tell stories, and that they’re not dry academic tomes, and I hope that they’re sort of fun to read because I want people to read them and learn from them and change their behavior.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes, well I’ll just confirm that these books are really fun to read, and there’s a lot of great stories and adventures and they’re real page turners and you learn a lot while you’re reading great stories at the same time.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And for me, there were times I just had to laugh, and there were other times where I was kind of more frustrated and thinking, okay, now it’s time to really take some action so…
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Good. Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay, well Elizabeth, I’d like to thank you very much for taking the time for this interview and for writing these great books.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Thanks for your interest. Take care.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Thanks a lot.
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