Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the wave of popular view is turning against you. From popular rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the red hot issue in our lives is the horror of bottled water and the waste its industry forces.
The producing, transporting and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up huge use of water as well as energy, and generates ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the 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 crew behind Tapped are promoting the show with their across-America roadshow, taking money from donors to reduce their water bottle abuse and swapping their used 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 famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this film delves into the strategy that goes into convincing Americans into purchasing around half a billion bottles of water each and every week, as opposed to a few cents cost for tapwater. Check out her film on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing tricks of the twentieth century and demands a powerful environmental alarm bell. She asks the red flags we must inevitably respond to. Who has ownership of our drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water corporation stakes a claim on your town’s drinking water? Is the water coming out of a tap absolutely safe? What is really the environmental cost of production, transporting and disposal of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians from everywhere around the world are beginning to understand that they are required to take responsibility – particularly when the meetings where they collate are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician in a function drinking from a water bottle. They must 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 from Australia to prohibited the sale of bottled water. About 60 townships in the United States and some places in Canada and the UK have prohibited the spending of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
It is doubtless that these problems will be on the agenda come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most time-sensitive water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
