Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Take a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the wave of popular perspective is turning against you. From big rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the hot debate in our lives is the horror that is bottled water and the waste its industry forces.
The processing, transportation and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires tremendous use of water along with energy, and pumps out huge quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent 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 crew are publicizing the movie with their across-America roadshow, asking donations from citizens to reduce their water bottle numbers and swapping their discarded plastic water bottle 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 critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animation displays the process that is used to conning Americans into purchasing around five hundred million bottles of water a week, despite the option of a few cents cost for tapwater. Find her film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the biggest marketing takeovers of our century and gives a powerful environmental alarm bell. She investigates the situations we must come to answer to. Who has ownership of the drinking water? What happens when a bottled-water factory holds your town’s water source? Is the water coming out of the tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental price of producing, transporting and disposing of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians around the world are beginning to understand that they have to take action – particularly when the institutions at which they debate are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a meeting drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they might find 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 community of Australia to stop the retail of bottled water. Some 60 towns in the US and a handful of cities in Canada and the UK have recently prevented spending taxpayer funds on bottled water.
No doubt these problems will be debated at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most time-sensitive water-related events.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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