The Water Bottle is Under Siege May 2, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Bear a plastic water bottle at your own risk; the pressure of popular view is coming back down on you. From popular rating documentaries, to articles and campaigns, the red hot issue on the soapbox is the problem of bottled water and the waste of resources the industry demonstrates.
The producing, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires big amounts of water as well as energy, and produces ridiculous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the hot new 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 Tapped crew are pushing the show with their across-America roadshow, asking donations from citizens to take down their water bottle numbers and swapping their used plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
A similar film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. By Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the process that goes into convincing Americans into buying around hundreds of millions of bottles of water each and every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for clean tap water. See the documentary on You Tube.
Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte explores one of the greatest marketing heists of the last century and provides a super environmental wakeup call. She asks the situations we must eventually understand. Who has ownership of the water? What could happen when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s water source? Is the water that comes out of a tap entirely safe? What is really the environmental price of production, transportation and disposing of a single plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the international community are beginning to realise that they need to take action ,especially when the buildings at which they work are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a meeting sipping from a water bottle. Why can’t they might find 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 from Australia to stop the retailing of bottled water. About 60 townships in the States and a handful in Canada and the UK have at this point prohibited the expenditure of taxpayer money on bottled water.
Surely these issues will be brought to the table in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most current water-related dilemmas.