Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Bear a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the wave of popular view is going against you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and politics, the hot news around is the horror around bottled water and the waste that the industry generates.
The producing, moving and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes tremendous quantities of water as well as energy, and creates huge measures of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the upcoming 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 Tapped team are publicizing the documentary with their across-America roadshow, collecting donations from donors to reduce their water bottle waste and changing their old plastic water bottle in exchange for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
Another such film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. Created by Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animated film shows the process that is behind convincing Americans into wasting at least half a billion bottles of water each week, despite the option of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Check out this new film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte explores one of the monumental marketing tricks of our century and gives a super environmental wakeup call. She asks the situations we must inevitably respond to. Who distributes our water supply? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s water supply? Is the water that comes out of a tap absolutely safe? What really is the environmental cost of producing, transportation and disposing of every plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the nation are realising that they need to take responsibility – particularly when the buildings where they serve are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a debate sipping from a water bottle. Surely they should be able to 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 community of Australia to stop the selling of bottled water. Some 60 cities in the United States and a few places in Canada and the United Kingdom have lately banned the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
It is certain that these dilemmas will be debated come 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.
