White Label Networks

Bear a plastic water bottle at your own risk; the wave of social view is going away from you. From big rating documentaries, to papers and political debate, the hottest news on the soapbox is the problem around bottled water and the waste the industry forces.

The production, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up huge waste of water and energy, and produces tremendous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the 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 team are publicizing the movie with their across-America roadshow, collecting donations from Americans to take down their water bottle use and changing their used plastic water bottle 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 critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animated film displays the process that is used to swaying Americans into consuming at least five hundred million bottles of water every week, instead of a few cents cost for tapwater. Look up the animation on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte explores one of the monumental marketing heists of the last century and provides a super environmental wakeup call. She explores the problems we must eventually answer to. Who appropriates our drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water business seizes your town’s water supply? Is the water coming out of the tap completely safe? What really is the environmental footprint of production, transportation and waste of a single plastic water bottle?

Politicians from around the world are beginning to realise that they are required to do something – markedly when the meetings in which they serve are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a political debate sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they should be able to locate 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 place of Australia to cease the retail of bottled water. About 60 cities in the United States and a few cities in Canada and the United Kingdom have at this point ceased the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.

No doubt this problem will be brought to the table in World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most problematic water-related problems.

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