Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege

Carry a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the wave of social perspective is going away from you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and politics, the biggest news in our lives is the menace that is bottled water and the waste the industry forces.

The processing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up large use of water alongside energy, and produces tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the hot new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig states “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 pushing the movie with their across-America roadshow, taking sponsorships from people to reduce their water bottle waste and changing their empty plastic water bottle in exchange 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 critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this film explores the method that amounts to swaying Americans into consuming more than half a billion bottles of water a week, instead of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Look up the film on You Tube.

In her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the most massive marketing coups of our century and provides a super environmental alarm bell. She investigates the red flags we must come to respond to. Who has ownership of the drinking water? What will happen when a bottled-water business seizes your town’s water source? Is the water coming from your tap entirely safe? What really is the environmental price of production, transporting and disposal of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians around the globe are realising that they need to take action – notably when the institutions at which they work are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a political debate drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they can use 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 in Australia to cease the sale of bottled water. About 60 towns in the States and a handful of cities in Canada and the United Kingdom have now banned expending taxpayer holdings on bottled water.

Surely this problem will be tabled during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most urgent water-related dilemmas.

Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.