ADF News

Bear a plastic water bottle to your own demise; the sway of popular view is going away from you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and politics, the biggest issue on the soapbox is the problem that is bottled water and the waste the industry forces.

The processing, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes big waste of water along with energy, and creates tremendous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the upcoming 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 crew are publicizing the show with their across-America roadshow, asking money from citizens to lower their water bottle abuse and swapping their old plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

Another short 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 short film shows the process that amounts to conning Americans into wasting over hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, compared with a few cents cost for clean tap water. Check out this new animation on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the biggest marketing cons of the last century and demands a super environmental wakeup call. She details the problems we must come to answer to. Who distributes the water distribution? What happens when a bottled-water company possesses your town’s water source? Is the water coming from the tap completely safe? What is the environmental footprint of making, transporting and waste of a single plastic water bottle?

Politicians all around the globe are acknowledging that they have to start the campaign – notably when the institutions in which they serve are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we view a politician at a 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, stated “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 from Australia to prohibited the retail of bottled water. Around 60 places in the States and a handful in Canada and the United Kingdom have lately banned expending taxpayer holdings on bottled water.

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

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