Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Take a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the tide of widespread belief is turning away from you. From top rating documentaries, to papers and politics, the hot debate in our lives is the terror that is bottled water and the waste the industry generates.
The producing, moving and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires tremendous amounts of water and energy, and generates tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the upcoming 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 crew are pushing the film with an across-America roadshow, asking pledges from donors to take down their water bottle numbers and changing their empty 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. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animated film delves into the process that is used to conning Americans into buying more than half a billion bottles of water a week, instead of a few cents cost for tapwater. Look up this short film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the monumental marketing heists of this century and demands a sudden environmental alarm bell. She asks the problems we must at some point understand. Who appropriates our drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water factory possesses your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes from your tap entirely safe? What is the environmental factor of production, transporting and disposal of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the world are acknowledging that they must do something – markedly when the places in which they work are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a meeting drinking from a water bottle. They must be able to locate a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, said “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 from Australia to prevent the selling of bottled water. Around 60 townships in the US and a handful of towns in Canada and the UK have at this point ceased the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
It is doubtless that this dilemma will be debated in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most problematic water-related events.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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