Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Bear a plastic water bottle at your own risk; the pressure of social view is turning away from you. From popular rating documentaries, to the written word and political campaigns, the red hot topic in town is the menace of bottled water and the waste the industry generates.
The processing, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands huge use of water and energy, and pumps out large quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the new 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 team behind Tapped are publicizing the film with their across-America roadshow, receiving sponsorships from people to take down their water bottle numbers and exchanging their used plastic water bottle in exchange 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 Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animation shows the method that is used to tricking Americans into buying at least hundreds of millions of bottles of water each week, despite the option of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. See this new film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing heists of our century and provides a powerful environmental alarm bell. She investigates the problems we must at some point understand. Who appropriates the drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water business possesses your town’s water source? Is the water that comes from the tap entirely safe? What really is the environmental factor of producing, transportation and waste of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the international community are beginning to realise that they are required to do something – notably when the meetings at which they collate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a conference sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they might find a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, said “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 in Australia to stop the selling of bottled water. About 60 townships in the American states and some towns in Canada and the UK have recently prevented the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water.
It is certain that these issues will be tabled come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most urgent water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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