Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the pressure of public opinion is forming on you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and politics, the hottest topic in our lives is the horror of bottled water and the waste that the industry pumps out.
The producing, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up large quantities of water as well as energy, and generates ridiculous quantities 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 Tapped crew are promoting the show with an across-America roadshow, collecting pledges from Americans to reduce their water bottle use and swapping their discarded 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 famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animated film shows the process that amounts to conning Americans into wasting at least five hundred million bottles of water each and every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Check out the film on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the biggest marketing tricks of our century and demands a sudden environmental wakeup call. She asks the problems we must inevitably understand. Who owns the water supply? What could happen when a bottled-water company seizes your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes from a tap entirely safe? What is really the environmental footprint of making, transporting and waste of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the nation are acknowledging that they need to take action – notably when the places where they debate are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a meeting sipping from a water bottle. Surely they must be able to drink from 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 community of Australia to ban the sale of bottled water. Around 60 towns in the US and a handful in Canada and the UK have lately banned expending taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
It is certain that this dilemma will be on the agenda come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most urgent water-related events.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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