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Bring a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the sway of popular view is going against you. From popular rating documentaries, to articles and political campaigns, the hot debate on the soapbox is the terror that is bottled water and the waste its industry creates.

The production, moving and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up tremendous waste of water and energy, and pumps out ridiculous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the new 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 Tapped team are promoting the film with their across-America roadshow, collecting pledges from donors to reduce their water bottle waste and swapping their empty 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 Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film shows the method that goes into convincing Americans into consuming more than five hundred million bottles of water each and every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for tapwater. Look up this film on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing tricks of our century and demands a strong environmental alarm. She investigates the problems we must inevitably respond to. Who has ownership of the water? What can happen when a bottled-water business seizes your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes from a tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental cost of producing, transportation and disposing of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians around the international community are beginning to understand that they have to take responsibility – particularly when the places in which they work are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a political debate drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they must be able to drink from 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 community of Australia to prohibited the sale of bottled water. About 60 townships in the US and a handful of towns in Canada and the UK have now banned spending taxpayer money on bottled water.

Surely this issue will be discussed at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most problematic water-related issues.

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