Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Take a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the tide of social belief is coming back down on you. From big rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the hot issue around is the horror that is bottled water and the waste of resources the industry demonstrates.
The processing, transportation and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands big use of water as well as energy, and generates huge quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent 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 crew of Tapped are plugging the movie with an across-America roadshow, collecting money from Americans to reduce their water bottle abuse and swapping their empty plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
Another short film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animation explores the methodology that goes into tricking Americans into buying over hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, instead of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Check out the short film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the most massive marketing cons of this century and demands a strong environmental alarm. She details the questions we must inevitably answer to. Who distributes our drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water factory holds your town’s water source? Is the water that comes out of your tap absolutely safe? What really is the environmental price of production, transportation and disposal of a plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the nation are beginning to realise that they are required to take responsibility for action – notably when the institutions in which they debate are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician in a meeting sipping from a water bottle. Surely they might 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 place in Australia to prevent the retailing of bottled water. At least 60 places in the American states and some in Canada and the UK have now stopped expending taxpayer funds on bottled water.
Surely these problems will be on the agenda at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most problematic water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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