Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
Carry a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the wave of widespread perspective is coming back down on you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and political debate, the hot issue in town is the problem of bottled water and the waste of resources the industry creates.
The processing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires big amounts of water as well as energy, and produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the hot new 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 crew of Tapped are plugging the film with an across-America roadshow, asking donations from Americans to reduce their water bottle waste and taking their used plastic water bottle 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 film delves into the strategy that is used to convincing Americans into wasting over five hundred million bottles of water every week, instead of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Find this new short film on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte explores one of the greatest marketing heists of this century and provides a powerful environmental alarm bell. She explores the situations we must come to answer to. Who distributes our water distribution? What can happen when a bottled-water factory stakes a claim on your town’s source? Is the water that comes from a tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental price of producing, transporting and disposing of every plastic water bottle?
Politicians all around the nation are realising that they must take responsibility – notably when the places at which they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician in a meeting drinking from a water bottle. Surely they must be able to use 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 group around Australia to stop the retail of bottled water. Some 60 townships in the States and a few in Canada and the UK have prohibited the expenditure of taxpayer money on bottled water.
Surely these problems will be debated at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most time-sensitive water-related problems.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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