Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
April 26th, 2010
Carry a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the sway of social belief is going away from you. From popular rating documentaries, to papers and politics, the hottest news on the soapbox is the menace around bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry creates.
The production, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes tremendous amounts of water and energy, and creates ridiculous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig claims “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 team are plugging the show with an across-America roadshow, receiving money from donors to lower their water bottle abuse and swapping their discarded plastic water bottle in exchange for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
Another such film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From Annie Leonard of the critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film delves into the process that is used to convincing Americans into purchasing around hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, instead of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Find her short film on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the most massive marketing heists of the last century and gives a powerful environmental alarm. She asks the situations we must eventually respond to. Who has ownership of our drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s water source? Is the water coming out of your tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental factor of production, transportation and disposing of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians around the globe are acknowledging that they need to take responsibility for action – notably when the institutions where they serve are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician at a press conference sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they must be able to 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 group of Australia to ban the retailing of bottled water. Around 60 townships in the United States and a handful in Canada and the UK have now prevented spending taxpayer holdings on bottled water.
Surely this issue will be on the agenda come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most current water-related issues.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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