CTO Blog

Take a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the wave of widespread view is coming back down on you. From popular rating documentaries, to articles and political debate, the red hot issue on the soapbox is the terror around bottled water and the waste that the industry creates.

The processing, transportation and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes large use of water and energy, and generates tremendous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the new 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 Tapped team are plugging the documentary with their across-America roadshow, collecting donations from Americans to lower their water bottle use and swapping their old plastic water bottle in exchange 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 famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animation explores the strategy that amounts to tricking Americans into consuming more than half a billion bottles of water every week, instead of a few cents cost for water from the tap. Check out this new animation on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the biggest marketing cons of the last century and demands a strong environmental wakeup call. She investigates the red flags we must inevitably understand. Who owns the water supply? What will happen when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s water source? Is the water that comes out of the tap absolutely safe? What is really the environmental cost of making, transportation and disposing of every plastic water bottle?

Politicians all around the world are realising that they have to take responsibility – notably when the institutions in which they collate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a meeting sipping from a water bottle. Why can’t they can 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 around Australia to ban the selling of bottled water. Around 60 towns in the States and some towns in Canada and the UK have now stopped expending taxpayer money on bottled water.

Surely this dilemma will be debated during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the globe’s most time-sensitive water-related issues.

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