The Water Bottle is Under Siege

31 Aug 2010 @ 7:34 AM

The Water Bottle is Under Siege

Take a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the sway of popular perspective is coming back down on you. From top rating documentaries, to books and political debate, the red hot debate in town is the horror around bottled water and the waste the industry creates.

The processing, moving and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires big use of water as well as energy, and pumps out ridiculous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig sums it up ’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 pushing the movie with their across-America roadshow, receiving money from people to reduce their water bottle numbers and exchanging their used plastic water bottle in exchange 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. By Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this film explores the method that is used to conning Americans into purchasing over hundreds of millions of bottles of water a week, as opposed to a few cents cost for clean tap water. See this documentary on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing tricks of the last century and provides a powerful environmental alarm bell. She asks the red flags we must inevitably deal with. Who owns the water? What happens when a bottled-water corporation possesses your town’s water supply? Is the water coming from the tap entirely safe? What is really the environmental cost of producing, transporting and waste of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians all around the world are acknowledging that they need to start the campaign ,particularly when the buildings in which they serve are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a government function sipping from a water bottle. Surely they might be able to drink from a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, claimed ‘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. At least 60 towns in the American states and a few cities in Canada and the United Kingdom have lately stopped the spending of taxpayer funds on bottled water.

It is certain that these problems will be on the agenda during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most urgent water-related issues.

http://worldnewsonline.info