Water bottle under siege – movies, books, governments

Carry a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the tide of public opinion is turning against you.  From top rating documentaries, to books and political campaigns, the menace of bottled water and the waste the discarded plastic bottles create, is the hottest issue in town.

The production, transportation and disposal of water in plastic bottles consumes large quantities of water and energy and produces large amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Stephanie Soechtig, Director of the new documentary Tapped: get off the bottle, says “1500 water bottles end up in landfill every second – that’s 30 million water bottles a day! We want to show people just how much waste is generated by bottled water.”  With a trans-America roadshow sponsored by Klean Kanteen, the Tapped team is collecting pledges from people to reduce their water bottle use and exchange their empty plastic bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle.   You can download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

Another short film The Story of Bottled Water, released on World Water Day in March was created by Annie Leonard of the acclaimed The Story of Stuff.  This animated film shows the strategy that goes into conning Americans into buying more than half a billion bottles of water every week, compared with a few cents cost for water from the tap.

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In her book Bottlemania, author Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century and gives a powerful environmental wakeup call. She investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Is the water coming from the tap completely safe? What is the environmental footprint of making, transporting and disposing of a plastic water bottle.

Politicians around the world realise they must take action – particularly as the institutions in which they serve are major consumers of bottled water.  How often do we see a politician at a press conference sipping from a water bottle?  Surely, the catering staff of Parliament House can provide a jug of tap water and a glass.    Afterall, tap water is virtually free while expensive bottled water can cost $4 or more a litre.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, said “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 ban the sale of bottled water.  At least 60 cities in the United States and some in Canada and the UK have banned spending taxpayer dollars on bottled water.

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