Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Bear a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the pressure of social view is turning on you. From popular rating documentaries, to articles and campaigns, the red hot news around is the horror of bottled water and the waste its industry demonstrates.
The production, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands tremendous amounts of water and energy, and creates huge quantities 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 crew of Tapped are pushing the documentary with their across-America roadshow, receiving money from donors to take down their water bottle numbers and taking their empty 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. Created by Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animation shows the strategy that is behind tricking Americans into consuming around hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Look up this new film on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the monumental marketing coups of this century and demands a super environmental wakeup call. She explores the problems we must come to answer to. Who has ownership of the water? What will happen when a bottled-water company possesses your town’s water source? Is the water coming from a tap wholly safe? What is the environmental factor of producing, transportation and disposing of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the world are beginning to realise that they need to take responsibility – especially when the institutions at which they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a political debate sipping from a water bottle. They should be able to locate a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, claimed “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 in Australia to stop the retail of bottled water. At least 60 places in the United States and some towns in Canada and the UK have at this point prevented the expenditure of taxpayer money on bottled water.
No doubt these issues will be debated in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most urgent water-related issues.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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