Carry a plastic water bottle to your own risk; the sway of social opinion is coming back down against you. From popular rating documentaries, to the written word and political campaigns, the red hot topic on the soapbox is the problem of bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry generates.
The processing, moving and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes big use of water alongside energy, and creates ridiculous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the hot 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 film with an across-America roadshow, asking sponsorships from citizens to lower their water bottle waste and exchanging their discarded plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
A similar film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. By Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animation shows the process that amounts to swaying Americans into consuming around half a billion bottles of water each week, as opposed to a few cents cost for clean tap water. Find the film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the monumental marketing heists of our century and provides a super environmental alarm bell. She explores the problems we must come to answer to. Who has ownership of the water distribution? What will happen when a bottled-water company seizes your town’s water source? Is the water that comes from a tap absolutely safe? What is really the environmental cost of production, transporting and disposal of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians around the nation are acknowledging that they are required to take action – markedly when the institutions at which they serve are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a government function drinking from a water bottle. Surely they should be able to locate a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, told “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 from Australia to stop the retailing of bottled water. About 60 towns in the States and some in Canada and the UK have now banned the spending of taxpayer holdings on bottled water.
It is certain that this problem will be brought to the table in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most current water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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