Take a plastic water bottle at your own hazard; the wave of widespread perspective is going against you. From high rating documentaries, to articles and political debate, the hottest news in town is the problem around bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry generates.

The producing, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands huge waste of water and energy, and creates ridiculous quantities 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 team behind Tapped are pushing the documentary with their across-America roadshow, asking money from donors to lower their water bottle numbers and taking 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 the pen of Annie Leonard of the critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the method that amounts to conning Americans into consuming more than half a billion bottles of water a week, as opposed to a few cents cost for water from the tap. See the documentary on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the most massive marketing tricks of the last century and gives a powerful environmental alarm. She asks the red flags we must at some point respond to. Who appropriates the drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water company holds your town’s water supply? Is the water that comes out of your tap absolutely safe? What is the environmental factor of producing, transportation and disposing of a single plastic water bottle?

Politicians from all around the globe are realising that they have to take responsibility – markedly when the places where they work are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a meeting drinking from a water bottle. It is probable that they can use 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 society around Australia to prevent the retail of bottled water. Around 60 townships in the American states and a handful of places in Canada and the United Kingdom have at this point prohibited the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water.

No doubt these dilemmas will be brought to the table come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most problematic water-related dilemmas.

Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.