Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the tide of popular view is turning on you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and politics, the biggest news in town is the menace of bottled water and the waste its industry demonstrates.
The processing, transportation and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes big amounts of water and energy, and creates ridiculous amounts 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 Tapped crew are promoting the show with an across-America roadshow, collecting donations from Americans to reduce their water bottle numbers and swapping their old 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. From Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film displays the strategy that is used to swaying Americans into buying more than hundreds of millions of bottles of water each week, despite the option of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. See the short film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte explores one of the most massive marketing takeovers of our century and gives a strong environmental alarm bell. She details the red flags we must come to understand. Who distributes the drinking water? What will happen when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Is the water that comes out of your tap wholly safe? What really is the environmental footprint of production, transportation and disposal of a plastic water bottle?
Politicians from everywhere around the globe are beginning to understand that they have to take action – markedly when the places where they collate are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a press conference sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they can 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 in Australia to prohibited the retailing of bottled water. At least 60 towns in the United States and some towns in Canada and the UK have stopped the spending of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
It is doubtless that these issues will be debated at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most time-sensitive water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
Posted by: Crane Data Logger 
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