Take a plastic water bottle to your own peril; the pressure of public perspective is forming away from you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and political campaigns, the hottest issue around is the terror that is bottled water and the waste the industry demonstrates.

The processing, transporting and disposal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands large quantities of water and energy, and pumps out large amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the hot new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig sums it up “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 team of Tapped are promoting the documentary with their across-America roadshow, taking sponsorships from people to lower their water bottle waste and swapping their old plastic water bottle in exchange for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

A short 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 delves into the method that is behind convincing Americans into purchasing at least five hundred million bottles of water each week, compared with a few cents cost for clean tap water. See this animation on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte demonstrates one of the monumental marketing heists of this century and demands a strong environmental wakeup call. She explores the problems we must inevitably understand. Who appropriates our drinking water? What can happen when a bottled-water company possesses your town’s water supply? Is the water coming from a tap absolutely safe? What is the environmental price of making, transporting and waste of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians around the globe are acknowledging that they have to take responsibility for action – particularly when the buildings in which they debate are huge consumers of bottled water. How often do we see a politician at a conference sipping from a water bottle. It is probable that they can find 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 place in Australia to ban the retail of bottled water. About 60 cities in the United States and some places in Canada and the UK have lately prohibited the expenditure of taxpayer holdings on bottled water.

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

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