Take a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the tide of widespread view is going against you. From high rating documentaries, to papers and politics, the hottest news in our lives is the horror of bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry forces.
The processing, moving and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires huge amounts of water as well as energy, and creates tremendous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig says “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 promoting the documentary with an across-America roadshow, collecting donations from people to take down their water bottle numbers 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. Created by Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animated film displays the methodology that goes into tricking Americans into wasting over half a billion bottles of water each week, instead of a few cents cost for water from the tap. Look up her film on You Tube.
With her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the greatest marketing tricks of the twentieth century and provides a powerful environmental alarm. She asks the situations we must eventually deal with. Who appropriates the water distribution? What will happen when a bottled-water corporation stakes a claim on your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes out of a tap completely safe? What is the environmental cost of producing, transporting and waste of one plastic water bottle?
Politicians from around the international community are beginning to understand that they must take responsibility for action – particularly when the institutions in which they work are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a debate sipping from a water bottle. Surely they should be able to locate 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 community in Australia to cease the sale of bottled water. About 60 towns in the US and a few cities in Canada and the UK have at this point banned the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
Surely this problem will be tabled 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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