Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege

Bring a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the tide of public perspective is coming back down against you. From top rating documentaries, to the written word and campaigns, the red hot topic in town is the horror of bottled water and the waste of resources the industry creates.

The production, transportation and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up huge quantities of water along with energy, and generates large amounts 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 team of Tapped are publicizing the movie with their across-America roadshow, taking donations from people to reduce their water bottle numbers and exchanging their empty 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 critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animation shows the process that amounts to conning Americans into purchasing at least five hundred million bottles of water each week, as opposed to a few cents cost for water from the tap. Find her documentary on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the monumental marketing tricks of the last century and provides a super environmental wakeup call. She investigates the problems we must inevitably understand. Who appropriates the water supply? What could happen when a bottled-water factory seizes your town’s source? Is the water that comes from your tap entirely safe? What is the environmental footprint of producing, transporting and disposal of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians from all around the international community are realising that they have to take action – notably when the meetings in which they work are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a political debate drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they can find 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 place in Australia to prohibited the retailing of bottled water. Around 60 towns in the American states and a handful of places in Canada and the UK have at this point ceased expending taxpayer holdings on bottled water.

It is doubtless that these problems will be tabled during 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.