Bring a plastic water bottle at your own hazard; the tide of social opinion is going on you. From big rating documentaries, to articles and political campaigns, the biggest news in our lives is the problem that is bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry creates.

The production, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles consumes huge quantities of water as well as energy, and creates large measures of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the recent documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig says “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 promoting the film with an across-America roadshow, collecting sponsorships from Americans to lower their water bottle waste and swapping their used 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 well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this animated film explores the process that is used to convincing Americans into wasting around hundreds of millions of bottles of water each and every week, compared with a few cents cost for clean tap water. Find this new documentary on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, writer Elizabeth Royte chronicles one of the greatest marketing tricks of this century and provides a super environmental wakeup call. She investigates the problems we must at some point deal with. Who owns our water supply? What will happen when a bottled-water business seizes your town’s drinking water? Is the water that comes from the tap entirely safe? What is really the environmental factor of producing, transporting and waste of every plastic water bottle?

Politicians from around the nation are realising that they have to start the campaign – particularly when the buildings at which they collate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a political debate sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they might 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 community in Australia to ban the sale of bottled water. About 60 towns in the American states and a few cities in Canada and the United Kingdom have at this point prohibited expending taxpayer funds on bottled water.

It is doubtless that these dilemmas will be discussed at World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most problematic water-related issues.

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