Bear a plastic water bottle at your own risk; the tide of social belief is coming back down on you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and political debate, the hottest news in town is the terror of bottled water and the waste its industry pumps out.

The producing, transportation and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up large waste of water as well as energy, and generates ridiculous quantities 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 people behind Tapped are pushing the film with an across-America roadshow, taking donations from citizens to lower their water bottle waste and swapping their old 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 acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animation explores the strategy that amounts to convincing Americans into consuming over hundreds of millions of bottles of water every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Look up her film on You Tube.

In her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte explores one of the biggest marketing cons of our century and demands a powerful environmental alarm bell. She investigates the situations we must inevitably respond to. Who appropriates the drinking water? What will happen when a bottled-water factory seizes your town’s water source? Is the water coming from your tap entirely safe? What is the environmental footprint of production, transporting and disposing of a single plastic water bottle?

Politicians from around the globe are beginning to understand that they are required to take responsibility – particularly when the places at which they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at 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 group in Australia to stop the sale of bottled water. Some 60 townships in the States and a handful of cities in Canada and the UK have recently stopped spending taxpayer dollars on bottled water.

No doubt this problem will be discussed at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most urgent water-related issues.

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

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