Bear a plastic water bottle at your own peril; the wave of widespread view is forming away from you. From popular rating documentaries, to the written word and politics, the biggest debate in our lives is the menace of bottled water and the waste the industry demonstrates.

The production, moving and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up big use of water as well as energy, and creates ridiculous measures of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the upcoming 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 publicizing the documentary with an across-America roadshow, asking donations from citizens to lower their water bottle waste 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. By Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this film shows the method that is used to tricking Americans into purchasing around half a billion bottles of water each week, instead of a few cents cost for clean tap water. Look up this new animation on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing tricks of the twentieth century and gives a strong environmental alarm bell. She investigates the problems we must inevitably deal with. Who distributes our drinking water? What will happen when a bottled-water corporation possesses your town’s source? Is the water that comes out of the tap entirely safe? What is the environmental cost of producing, transporting and waste of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians all around the world are acknowledging that they need to take action – especially when the institutions in which they debate are large consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician at a government function drinking from a water bottle. It is probable that they might use a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, said “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 cease the sale of bottled water. At least 60 townships in the United States and a few in Canada and the UK have lately prohibited the spending of taxpayer funds on bottled water.

Surely these problems will be tabled at 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.