Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Bring a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the sway of social opinion is going away from you. From top rating documentaries, to books and political campaigns, the hot debate in our lives is the menace that is bottled water and the waste its industry creates.
The production, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands huge waste of water as well as energy, and generates large amounts 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 of Tapped are pushing the show with their across-America roadshow, asking money from people to reduce their water bottle abuse and exchanging their discarded plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
A short 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 short animation delves into the methodology that amounts to conning Americans into buying more than five hundred million bottles of water each week, as opposed to a few cents cost for clean tap water. Look up her short film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the monumental marketing cons of the last century and demands a sudden environmental wakeup call. She investigates the questions we must at some point respond to. Who has ownership of the water distribution? What will happen when a bottled-water business seizes your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes out of your tap wholly safe? What really is the environmental factor of production, transporting and disposal of a plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the world are acknowledging that they are required to do something – markedly when the places where they collate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a debate drinking from a water bottle. They must be able to drink from 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 community from Australia to ban the retailing of bottled water. Some 60 cities in the American states and a handful of towns in Canada and the UK have at this point ceased the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water.
No doubt this dilemma will be tabled in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most current water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
Sphere: Related ContentComments
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!