Bring a plastic water bottle at your own hazard; the sway of public opinion is turning away from you. From big rating documentaries, to papers and political campaigns, the hottest issue in our lives is the horror around bottled water and the waste of resources that the industry demonstrates.

The processing, transportation and removal of water in petrochemical plastic bottles demands large waste of water and energy, and produces large 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 Tapped crew are plugging the documentary with their across-America roadshow, taking money from donors to reduce their water bottle numbers and taking 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. By Annie Leonard of the well-received ‘The Story of Stuff’, this short film delves into the methodology that amounts to tricking Americans into consuming more than five hundred million bottles of water a week, instead of a few cents cost for tapwater. Check out this new short film on You Tube.

Through her book ‘Bottlemania’, investigator Elizabeth Royte explores one of the most massive marketing takeovers of the twentieth century and gives a sudden environmental alarm. She details the problems we must eventually understand. Who distributes our water? What happens when a bottled-water corporation seizes your town’s water supply? Is the water coming from your tap absolutely safe? What really is the environmental footprint of making, transporting and waste of one plastic water bottle?

Politicians all around the nation are acknowledging that they need to take action – notably when the buildings at which they serve are major consumers of bottled water. How often do we witness a politician in a political debate drinking from a water bottle. They can locate a water glass in Parliament House.

Leslie Samuelrich of Corporate Accountability International, claimed “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 prohibited the retailing of bottled water. Around 60 townships in the US and a handful in Canada and the United Kingdom have recently banned spending taxpayer funds on bottled water.

It is certain that these problems will be on the agenda come World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the environment’s most current water-related issues.

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