Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Bring a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the wave of widespread perspective is turning against you. From popular rating documentaries, to books and political campaigns, the hot debate in our lives is the menace around bottled water and the waste of resources the industry pumps out.
The processing, moving and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes huge waste of water and energy, and generates huge amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent 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 people behind Tapped are pushing the movie with an across-America roadshow, taking pledges from people to take down their water bottle numbers and taking their used 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. From Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the strategy that is behind swaying Americans into buying at least hundreds of millions of bottles of water each and every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for tapwater. See her animation on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the biggest marketing cons of the twentieth century and demands a super environmental wakeup call. She details the red flags we must inevitably understand. Who owns the water supply? What will happen when a bottled-water factory stakes a claim on your town’s water supply? Is the water coming out of a tap wholly safe? What really is the environmental cost of making, transportation and disposing of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the nation are acknowledging that they must start the campaign – markedly when the places in which they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a political debate sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they should be able to use a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, held that “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 group in Australia to cease the retail of bottled water. Some 60 towns in the US and some in Canada and the UK have prohibited the spending of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
No doubt this issue will be on the agenda during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most problematic water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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