Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Bring a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the sway of public view is turning on you. From popular rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the red hot news in our lives is the menace of bottled water and the waste that the industry pumps out.
The processing, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up big quantities of water and energy, and generates tremendous measures 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 Tapped crew are promoting the movie with an across-America roadshow, taking pledges from donors to reduce their water bottle abuse and taking their empty 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 short animation shows the strategy that goes into convincing Americans into buying around hundreds of millions of bottles of water a week, compared with a few cents cost for tapwater. See this new short film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the biggest marketing cons of our century and provides a super environmental alarm. She details the problems we must come to deal with. Who appropriates the water supply? What happens when a bottled-water corporation stakes a claim on your town’s water source? Is the water coming from the tap wholly safe? What is the environmental factor of producing, transportation and disposing of a plastic water bottle?
Politicians from around the globe are beginning to realise that they need to start the campaign – markedly when the buildings at which they debate are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a conference drinking from a water bottle. They can drink from 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 place of Australia to cease the retailing of bottled water. About 60 towns in the American states and some towns in Canada and the UK have lately banned expending taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
No doubt this dilemma will be tabled come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most time-sensitive water-related issues.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.