Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the wave of social belief is coming back down away from you. From big rating documentaries, to books and political campaigns, the hottest topic around is the terror that is bottled water and the waste the industry demonstrates.
The production, transporting and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes tremendous amounts of water as well as energy, and generates huge amounts 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 people behind Tapped are pushing the show with an across-America roadshow, receiving donations from donors to lower their water bottle use and exchanging their empty 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. By Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animated film explores the method that is behind tricking Americans into purchasing more than half a billion bottles of water a week, compared with a few cents cost for clean tap water. See this film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the monumental marketing tricks of the last century and gives a super environmental alarm bell. She asks the situations we must inevitably answer to. Who has ownership of our water supply? What can happen when a bottled-water company holds your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes from the tap absolutely safe? What really is the environmental footprint of production, transporting and waste of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the globe are beginning to understand that they must do something – particularly when the meetings in which they debate are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a political debate sipping from a water bottle. Surely they can 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 society from Australia to prevent the sale of bottled water. At least 60 cities in the US and a few places in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently stopped the spending of taxpayer holdings on bottled water.
It is certain that this dilemma will be tabled at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most current water-related issues.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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