The manager looked through the numbers there wasn’t enough. They needed Pete to work overtime and Eric to stay late. Pumping gas. They had to offset it, capture it, compress it, and force it into the water. Billions and billions of bottles made specifically to grab the carbon dioxide here and release it somewhere else, somewhere poorer. While they belch out bubbles we belch out billions. At least that was the last investor meeting slogan. That wasn’t their public slogan. That was “Always Bubbling, Always Fresh”. At this factory they took the air directly from the effluent of a garbage pile larger than what LA used to be. There was a cleaning process that didn’t work that well, but the flavours masked any of this. At least the focus groups couldn’t tell the difference. Some even liked it more. One of the nicer factories used the air from hospitals another from prisons. The idea there was the polluted air first was filtered through the lungs of people, and any pollutants would collect there. So this air was really clean. Just a bit slower to make, this was reserved for the un flavoured bottles. Anyway it just gets released later and we collect it again. And the cycle continues.