Business Podcasting Blog

Carry a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the tide of popular opinion is coming back down away from you. From high rating documentaries, to books and politics, the red hot debate around is the menace that is bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry creates.

The producing, transporting and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up huge waste of water and energy, and generates tremendous quantities of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the recent 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 crew behind Tapped are plugging the film with their across-America roadshow, receiving sponsorships from donors to reduce their water bottle use and swapping their empty 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. From Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film displays the method that is behind convincing Americans into wasting over hundreds of millions of bottles of water each and every week, instead of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. See this new short film on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte explores one of the greatest marketing takeovers of the twentieth century and gives a sudden environmental alarm. She asks the situations we must inevitably respond to. Who owns the water supply? What happens when a bottled-water factory seizes your town’s water supply? Is the water that comes from a tap completely safe? What really is the environmental price of production, transportation and waste of a single plastic water bottle?

Politicians from everywhere around the nation are acknowledging that they need to start the campaign – notably when the meetings in which they serve are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a political debate sipping from a water bottle. Why can’t they might use a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, claimed “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 prohibited the selling of bottled water. At least 60 townships in the American states and a handful of towns in Canada and the UK have lately stopped spending taxpayer money on bottled water.

No doubt this issue will be debated come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the planet’s most problematic water-related dilemmas.

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