Carry a plastic water bottle at your own risk; the sway of public view is turning on you. From top rating documentaries, to papers and politics, the hot topic around is the problem around bottled water and the waste the industry pumps out.
The processing, moving and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands huge amounts of water alongside energy, and creates huge 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 of Tapped are plugging the show with their across-America roadshow, taking donations from donors to reduce 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.
A short film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. Created by Annie Leonard of the critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film explores the method that is behind convincing Americans into buying over five hundred million bottles of water each and every week, compared with a few cents cost for clean tap water. See the short film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the most massive marketing coups of our century and provides a strong environmental alarm. She asks the questions we must inevitably answer to. Who has ownership of the water supply? What happens when a bottled-water business seizes your town’s drinking water? Is the water coming from a tap completely safe? What is really the environmental footprint of producing, transportation and disposing of every plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the globe are beginning to realise that they have to take action – especially when the meetings in which they work are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a press conference drinking from a water bottle. Surely they can locate 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 around Australia to prohibited the sale of bottled water. At least 60 towns in the US and some in Canada and the UK have prevented the spending of taxpayer holdings on bottled water.
Surely these issues will be on the agenda in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most urgent water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.