Carry a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the pressure of social opinion is coming back down away from you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and political debate, the red hot debate on the soapbox is the terror that is bottled water and the waste of resources the industry creates.
The processing, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes large quantities of water and energy, and creates ridiculous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the hot new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig says “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 team behind Tapped are plugging the movie with their across-America roadshow, receiving donations from Americans to lower their water bottle use and changing their used 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. By Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this film shows the method that goes into swaying Americans into buying over five hundred million bottles of water each and every week, compared with a few cents cost for tapwater. Find this documentary on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the greatest marketing tricks of this century and gives a strong environmental alarm. She explores the red flags we must inevitably understand. Who appropriates the drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes out of a tap absolutely safe? What is the environmental cost of making, transportation and disposal of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians around the international community are beginning to realise that they must start the campaign – particularly when the meetings at which they serve are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a function drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they should be able to use 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 society from Australia to prohibited the sale of bottled water. About 60 places in the United States and some towns in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently ceased the expenditure of taxpayer money on bottled water.
It is doubtless that these problems 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 dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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