Business Podcasting Blog

Carry a plastic water bottle to your own hazard; the wave of public belief is turning on you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and political campaigns, the hottest topic around is the problem that is bottled water and the waste its industry generates.

The processing, transportation and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up tremendous waste of water as well as energy, and generates large amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the recent 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 crew behind Tapped are promoting the documentary with an across-America roadshow, collecting money from Americans to reduce their water bottle use and changing their discarded plastic water bottle for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

Another such 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 short animated film shows the methodology that goes into swaying Americans into wasting at least five hundred million bottles of water a week, as opposed to a few cents cost for clean tap water. Look up this documentary on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century and gives a strong environmental wakeup call. She asks the questions we must at some point respond to. Who owns our drinking water? What could happen when a bottled-water corporation seizes your town’s source? Is the water that comes out of the tap entirely safe? What is really the environmental cost of production, transporting and waste of every plastic water bottle?

Politicians from all around the world are realising that they need to take responsibility – markedly when the meetings where they collate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a debate drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they must be able to use a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, held that “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 of Australia to cease the sale of bottled water. Some 60 towns in the American states and a handful of places in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently ceased the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water.

Surely these problems will be tabled at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most time-sensitive water-related problems.

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