Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege

Take a plastic water bottle to your own risk; the pressure of public opinion is forming away from you. From big rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the biggest issue on the soapbox is the horror around bottled water and the waste of resources the industry generates.

The production, transporting and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands tremendous quantities of water alongside energy, and creates huge amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the hot new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig states “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 crew behind Tapped are pushing the show with an across-America roadshow, asking pledges from Americans to lower their water bottle use and swapping their empty plastic water bottle in exchange for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

A similar film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. Created by Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film delves into the methodology that is behind convincing Americans into buying at least five hundred million bottles of water each week, instead of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Look up this new short film on You Tube.

In her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the most massive marketing heists of the last century and provides a powerful environmental alarm bell. She explores the red flags we must at some point deal with. Who owns our drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s water source? Is the water coming from your tap wholly safe? What is the environmental factor of making, transporting and disposing of every plastic water bottle?

Politicians around the nation are beginning to understand that they must take responsibility for action – notably when the meetings in which they work are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a political debate drinking from a water bottle. Surely they can use a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, held that “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 group around Australia to ban the sale of bottled water. About 60 townships in the States and a handful of places in Canada and the UK have now stopped the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water.

Surely this issue will be debated during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most problematic water-related events.

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

Comments

• Search for:
• 
  
  

•