Bring a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the sway of popular opinion is coming back down on you. From popular rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the hottest issue in our lives is the terror around bottled water and the waste its industry creates.

The producing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes large use of water alongside energy, and generates huge quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the upcoming documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig claims “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 team of Tapped are promoting the film with their across-America roadshow, collecting donations from people to reduce their water bottle waste and exchanging their old plastic water bottle in exchange 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 well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film shows the methodology that is behind tricking Americans into purchasing at least hundreds of millions of bottles of water a week, compared with a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Find the animation on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the monumental marketing tricks of our century and demands a powerful environmental wakeup call. She asks the problems we must inevitably deal with. Who appropriates the water supply? What can happen when a bottled-water corporation holds your town’s water supply? Is the water that comes from your tap completely safe? What really is the environmental cost of production, transporting and waste of a plastic water bottle?

Politicians all around the globe are beginning to understand that they have to do something – particularly when the meetings at which they debate are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a debate drinking from a water bottle. It is probable that they must be able to find a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, told “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 cease the retailing of bottled water. About 60 cities in the US and a handful of places in Canada and the UK have now banned expending taxpayer holdings on bottled water.

Surely these dilemmas will be debated come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most current water-related events.

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

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