Take a plastic water bottle at your own demise; the pressure of public belief is turning against you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and campaigns, the hottest topic in town is the terror around bottled water and the waste that the industry creates.

The producing, transporting and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands large use of water alongside energy, and creates ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the upcoming 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 crew of Tapped are plugging the movie with an across-America roadshow, taking sponsorships from donors to lower their water bottle waste and changing their discarded 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 critically acclaimed ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short animated film explores the methodology that is used to tricking Americans into consuming more than half a billion bottles of water every week, despite the option of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Find her animation on You Tube.

With her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the most massive marketing cons of this century and demands a sudden environmental wakeup call. She explores the red flags we must eventually understand. Who distributes the drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water business holds your town’s water supply? Is the water that comes out of your tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental factor of production, transporting and disposing of a plastic water bottle?

Politicians around the international community are beginning to understand that they have to do something – markedly when the meetings where they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician at a debate drinking from a water bottle. They should 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 place around Australia to prevent the retail of bottled water. Some 60 townships in the United States and a handful of places in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently prohibited the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on bottled water.

No doubt this problem will be on the agenda come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most current water-related problems.

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