Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle to your own risk; the pressure of widespread opinion is coming back down against you. From popular rating documentaries, to papers and politics, the hottest news on the soapbox is the problem of bottled water and the waste the industry forces.
The producing, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up huge quantities of water as well as energy, and generates ridiculous amounts 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 team behind Tapped are promoting the movie with their across-America roadshow, taking money from citizens to lower their water bottle use and changing their old plastic water bottle in exchange 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 the pen of Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this film shows the methodology that amounts to swaying Americans into wasting over hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, compared with a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Check out this new documentary on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the most massive marketing tricks of our century and provides a super environmental wakeup call. She asks the questions we must come to deal with. Who appropriates our drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water corporation stakes a claim on your town’s source? Is the water that comes from your tap completely safe? What is really the environmental factor of making, transportation and disposal of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the international community are realising that they need to take responsibility for action – notably when the meetings at which they serve are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a political debate sipping from a water bottle. Surely they might be able to drink from 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 in Australia to cease the retail of bottled water. At least 60 cities in the US and some towns in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently prohibited expending taxpayer money on bottled water.
No doubt these dilemmas will be brought to the table during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most urgent water-related issues.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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