Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege

Carry a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the tide of popular opinion is going on you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and political campaigns, the hottest topic around is the horror around bottled water and the waste that the industry forces.

The producing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up large waste of water along with energy, and creates tremendous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the upcoming documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig claims “1500 water bottles end up in landfill every second – that’s 30 million water bottles a day! We wanted to show people just how much waste is generated by bottled water.” The Tapped team are publicizing the film with an across-America roadshow, asking pledges from donors to take down their water bottle numbers and taking their old plastic water bottle in exchange for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

Another such film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animation displays the method that is used to swaying Americans into purchasing around half a billion bottles of water each week, despite the option of a few cents cost for tapwater. Find this new film on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the monumental marketing cons of this century and demands a super environmental alarm. She asks the problems we must at some point deal with. Who appropriates our drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water business stakes a claim on your town’s water source? Is the water that comes from the tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental footprint of making, transporting and disposal of a single plastic water bottle?

Politicians from around the nation are beginning to understand that they are required to take responsibility for action – notably when the buildings at which they serve are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a press conference drinking from a water bottle. Surely they must be able to locate a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, claimed “Cities and states are spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on bottled water, and that’s not to mention what’s spent to deal with all the plastic bottles that are thrown out.”

In July 2009, the NSW rural town of Bundanoon became the first place around Australia to stop the selling of bottled water. Around 60 townships in the States and a handful in Canada and the UK have lately prevented the spending of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.

It is doubtless that this dilemma will be on the agenda in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most current water-related events.

Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.