ADF News

Bring a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the sway of widespread perspective is going against you. From popular rating documentaries, to the written word and political campaigns, the hot debate around is the terror of bottled water and the waste of resources the industry creates.

The producing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires big quantities of water and energy, and creates large quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the hot 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 publicizing the film with their across-America roadshow, receiving sponsorships from people to lower their water bottle abuse and changing their old 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. Created by Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the method that is used to swaying Americans into purchasing over hundreds of millions of bottles of water a week, as opposed to a few cents cost for water from the tap. See her short film on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century and gives a super environmental alarm bell. She details the situations we must at some point respond to. Who owns the water distribution? What can happen when a bottled-water corporation holds your town’s water supply? Is the water coming out of your tap absolutely safe? What is really the environmental factor of producing, transportation and disposal of every plastic water bottle?

Politicians from all around the globe are acknowledging that they have to do something – especially when the buildings where they work are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a conference sipping from a water bottle. Why can’t they should be able to use 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 society from Australia to cease the selling of bottled water. At least 60 places in the United States and a few in Canada and the UK have recently prohibited the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.

It is doubtless that these problems will be debated during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most problematic water-related problems.

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