Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the pressure of popular perspective is coming back down on you. From top rating documentaries, to books and political campaigns, the red hot topic in town is the problem of bottled water and the waste the industry pumps out.
The production, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up tremendous waste of water and energy, and generates tremendous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the hot new 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 team behind Tapped are plugging the documentary with an across-America roadshow, receiving donations from donors to take down their water bottle numbers and taking their old plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
Another short film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the strategy that goes into convincing Americans into buying more than half a billion bottles of water each week, compared with a few cents cost for tapwater. Check out her film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte explores one of the biggest marketing cons of our century and provides a powerful environmental alarm. She details the red flags we must inevitably answer to. Who has ownership of our drinking water? What will happen when a bottled-water business holds your town’s water source? Is the water that comes from a tap wholly safe? What is the environmental footprint of production, transporting and waste of a plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the nation are beginning to understand that they must take responsibility for action – especially when the institutions at which they collate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a debate drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they should be able to locate a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, stated “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 in Australia to prohibited the retailing of bottled water. Around 60 towns in the US and a handful of towns in Canada and the UK have now ceased expending taxpayer holdings on bottled water.
No doubt this issue will be debated at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most urgent water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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