Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle to your own risk; the wave of popular perspective is going away from you. From high rating documentaries, to papers and politics, the hot issue on the soapbox is the horror that is bottled water and the waste its industry forces.
The production, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires huge use of water alongside energy, and pumps out huge quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig sums it up “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 crew are publicizing the film with their across-America roadshow, receiving donations from Americans to lower their water bottle numbers and exchanging 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. Created by Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film shows the process that is used to tricking Americans into consuming more than five hundred million bottles of water a week, compared with a few cents cost for water from the tap. See this short film on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the biggest marketing takeovers of our century and demands a powerful environmental wakeup call. She details the red flags we must at some point deal with. Who distributes our water? What can happen when a bottled-water business possesses your town’s source? Is the water that comes from your tap entirely safe? What really is the environmental footprint of production, transporting and disposing of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians from everywhere around the globe are acknowledging that they must do something – notably when the institutions at which they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician in a press conference sipping from a water bottle. Surely they might be able to find a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, said “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 in Australia to stop the sale of bottled water. At least 60 towns in the US and a handful of cities in Canada and the UK have recently banned spending taxpayer money on bottled water.
It is doubtless that this issue will be discussed at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most urgent water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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