Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Take a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the tide of social opinion is forming on you. From top rating documentaries, to articles and politics, the red hot debate around is the terror of bottled water and the waste the industry generates.
The producing, transporting and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands tremendous amounts of water and energy, and generates ridiculous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the hot new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig sums it up “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 show with an across-America roadshow, receiving donations from Americans to take down their water bottle use and changing their used 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. From Annie Leonard of the critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film displays the process that amounts to convincing Americans into buying more than five hundred million bottles of water each and every week, compared with a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. See the film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the biggest marketing tricks of the twentieth century and gives a super environmental alarm. She details the red flags we must inevitably respond to. Who appropriates the water? What can happen when a bottled-water company holds your town’s drinking water? Is the water coming out of your tap completely safe? What really is the environmental factor of production, transporting and disposing of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians from everywhere around the world are realising that they need to do something – notably when the meetings in which they work are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a debate sipping from a water bottle. Surely they can find 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 place of Australia to stop the retail of bottled water. At least 60 places in the US and a handful of places in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently prevented spending taxpayer money 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 globe’s most problematic water-related events.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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