Take a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the sway of social opinion is going on you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and political campaigns, the red hot topic in town is the horror around bottled water and the waste of resources the industry demonstrates.
The processing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands tremendous quantities of water and energy, and produces 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 publicizing the show with their across-America roadshow, taking pledges from people to take down their water bottle numbers and taking their old 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. By Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the strategy that is behind tricking Americans into buying at least half a billion bottles of water each week, as opposed to a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. See this animation on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte explores one of the monumental marketing coups of our century and gives a sudden environmental alarm. She details the situations we must eventually answer to. Who appropriates the water distribution? What can happen when a bottled-water company possesses your town’s water source? Is the water coming from the tap entirely safe? What is really the environmental cost of production, transportation and disposing of a plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the globe are realising that they are required to start the campaign – notably when the meetings at which they work are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a debate drinking from a water bottle. Surely they must be able to find 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 community in Australia to ban the retailing of bottled water. At least 60 townships in the US and a handful of cities in Canada and the UK have recently ceased the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
Surely this problem will be debated come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most urgent water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
Tags: water bottleApril 26th, 2010UncategorizedRead More >No Comments
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