Movies, Books, Politicians the Water Bottle is Under Siege
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Bear a plastic water bottle to your own risk; the pressure of public opinion is forming against you. From high rating documentaries, to papers and political debate, the hottest news in our lives is the terror that is bottled water and the waste of resources the industry creates.
The production, moving and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires big amounts of water and energy, and creates tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.
Director of the recent documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig states “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 of Tapped are publicizing the movie with an across-America roadshow, taking donations from donors to reduce their water bottle numbers and swapping their used plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.
A short film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animated film displays the method that amounts to conning Americans into consuming at least hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, instead of a few cents cost for water from the tap. Find this new animation on You Tube.
In her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the monumental marketing heists of the last century and gives a strong environmental wakeup call. She explores the questions we must at some point understand. Who distributes our water? What can happen when a bottled-water corporation seizes your town’s water source? Is the water coming out of a tap entirely safe? What really is the environmental factor of production, transportation and waste of every plastic water bottle?
Politicians from all around the international community are beginning to realise that they need to take action – markedly when the meetings at which they serve are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a conference sipping from a water bottle. Surely they must be able to drink from a water glass in Parliament House.
Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, told “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 of Australia to prevent the retail of bottled water. Some 60 places in the United States and a handful of places in Canada and the UK have lately prohibited expending taxpayer dollars on bottled water.
Surely these issues will be debated in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most urgent water-related dilemmas.
Article written by Tracey Bailey, founder of Biome Eco Stores.
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