Bring a plastic water bottle at your own hazard; the tide of popular perspective is coming back down against you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and political campaigns, the biggest news on the soapbox is the problem of bottled water and the waste its industry generates.
The producing, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires huge amounts of water alongside energy, and generates huge quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the upcoming documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig says “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 of Tapped are pushing the movie with their across-America roadshow, collecting donations from donors to lower their water bottle waste and changing their empty plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
Another short film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animated film explores the method that goes into conning Americans into wasting more than five hundred million bottles of water a week, despite the option of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Check out this new short film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte explores one of the monumental marketing coups of the last century and demands a powerful environmental alarm bell. She explores the problems we must eventually understand. Who has ownership of the drinking water? What happens when a bottled-water factory possesses your town’s source? Is the water that comes out of the tap completely safe? What is really the environmental factor of making, transporting and disposing of every plastic water bottle?
Politicians from everywhere around the nation are beginning to realise that they need to start the campaign – particularly when the meetings where they work are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a political debate drinking from a water bottle. They can find a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, stated “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 stop the retailing of bottled water. Some 60 townships in the United States and some cities in Canada and the United Kingdom have now stopped the spending of taxpayer funds on bottled water.
Surely these dilemmas will be tabled in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most urgent water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.