Social Media Army

Bring a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the wave of social perspective is coming back down against you. From popular rating documentaries, to articles and campaigns, the hot issue in our lives is the terror around bottled water and the waste of resources the industry pumps out.

The producing, transporting and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles requires big quantities of water as well as energy, and creates tremendous amounts 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 pushing the documentary with their across-America roadshow, collecting money from citizens to reduce their water bottle abuse and changing their empty plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

A similar film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animated film shows the methodology that is behind conning Americans into buying around half a billion bottles of water each week, as opposed to a few cents cost for water from the tap. Look up this film on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the most massive marketing coups of the twentieth century and gives a strong environmental wakeup call. She details the red flags we must come to answer to. Who has ownership of the water distribution? What can happen when a bottled-water corporation holds your town’s water supply? Is the water coming out of a tap absolutely safe? What is really the environmental factor of production, transporting and waste of a plastic water bottle?

Politicians from everywhere around the globe are beginning to understand that they are required to take responsibility – particularly when the buildings at which they serve are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a conference sipping from a water bottle. Surely they should be able to use 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 in Australia to prevent the selling of bottled water. At least 60 cities in the US and a handful of cities in Canada and the UK have ceased the expenditure of taxpayer money on bottled water.

No doubt this dilemma will be discussed 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.