Bear a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the tide of social view is forming against you. From top rating documentaries, to articles and campaigns, the red hot topic around is the horror that is bottled water and the waste the industry creates.
The production, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes huge quantities of water and energy, and produces 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 team are plugging the movie with an across-America roadshow, collecting pledges from donors to reduce their water bottle use and swapping their discarded 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. Created by Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animation shows the method that amounts to swaying Americans into wasting more than half a billion bottles of water a week, instead of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Find this film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the biggest marketing cons of our century and provides a sudden environmental alarm bell. She investigates the problems we must inevitably understand. Who appropriates the drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water corporation seizes your town’s source? Is the water that comes from the tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental footprint of producing, transportation and waste of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians around the international community are beginning to realise that they are required to take responsibility for action – particularly when the buildings at which they collate are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a press conference sipping from a water bottle. They should 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 place around Australia to prohibited the sale of bottled water. About 60 places in the American states and a few towns in Canada and the UK have prohibited spending taxpayer money on bottled water.
It is certain that these dilemmas will be discussed in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most current water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
