Movie Mondays: Story of Stuff Bottled Water

Hello again and welcome back to Movie Mondays on The Body Blog.  This is a series that reviews and summarizes movies, documentaries, series and different interest pieces.  They can be about health, food, nutrition, environmental issues involving pollution, animals, going green or pretty much anything else you can think of in related categories.  This is purely a reader interest driven series suggested by you the readers.  If you have any suggestions or want to write your own summary of your favorite viewing please send them over!

Last week, we reviewed the movie, “Hemp Revolution.”  This week instead of doing a movie, I wanted to expose everyone to a little known site on the internet with big implications.  It’s called The Story of Stuff.  Now you can go visit if you want, and in fact I encourage you to, but from time to time I will pick one of the Story of Stuff mini-movies and summarize them for you all.  This is all important stuff to consider.  See talking about going green is one thing, actually taking some obvious steps to reduce your carbon and chemical footprint is another, but LEARNING about how you can actively start participating in this green revolution is completely different.  That’s what The Story of Stuff is all about and why I love it.

Annie Leonard is the author and host of the online film, The Story of Stuff, a fast paced, fact filled expose on the hidden environmental and social costs of current systems of production and consumption. The film has become an internet phenomenon, generating over 6.5 million views in 200 countries and territories since its launch in December 2007. She is now working on a book version of the film, to be published by Free Press of Simon and Schuster in March 2010.

Annie has spent nearly two decades investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues. She has traveled to 40 countries, visiting literally hundreds of factories where our stuff is made and dumps where our stuff is dumped. Witnessing first hand the horrendous impacts of both over- and under- consumption around the world, Annie is fiercely dedicated to reclaiming and transforming our industrial and economic systems so they serve, rather than undermine, ecological sustainability and social equity.

This lady has it right. Demonstrating how much money and waste is generated by people buying and drinking bottled water. Then they have the nerve to complain about higher gas prices that they could afford better if they didn't buy bottled water!

Today, I wanted to quickly summarize bottled water according to the film.  The biggest point the movie is trying to get across is that soda companies started the bottled water craze when they realized that there was only so much soda a person would drink.  Therefore, these big marketing machines decided that in order to sell a lot of bottled water, they would have to “manufacture demand” for it.  So they started fear campaigns around our tap water systems to try to convince us that tap water is dangerous and gross and bottled water is pristine and tasty.  In many ways bottled water is less regulated than tap and costs 2000 times more!  Moreover, 1/3 of all bottled water is simply purified tap anyway (not from a gorgeous mountain stream like the picture on the bottle).  In taste tests across the country tap consistently beats bottled water so why do we buy so much?  ”Manufactured demand.”

It has to be the advertising because when you look at what bottled water really is, if you are developing eco-consciousness at all then you can’t justify buying so much.  The amount of oil that is needed to make all the bottles used for water in the US can power 1 million cars!  Then you have to add in the extra oil and pollution to ship it to market, the energy used to store it and sell it to us, and then we drink it in 2 minutes!  Though not expressly said, there is no way that the TRUE cost to our planet of bottled water is only 15 cents!

OK, but what about recycling right?  In actuality only  a small fraction of bottles ever get recycled.  As in 80% of bottles never get recycled.  There are huge ship loads of plastic bottles being shipped to India to sit in landfills.  Some get “downcycled” into lower quality products and thrown away later but many of them never get recycled.  So we waste a lot of energy by shipping our bottles to someone else’s landfill across the globe.

There is a better solution than all these wasted bottles

Yes, in some places water is polluted.  God forbid you live in an area whose ground water has been contaminated.  Know how it got that way?  Big business polluters, cough, like the bottled water companies.  The public tap water programs are underfunded by $24 billion nationwide.  Why?  Partly because we drink so much tap water which means that we aren’t demanding more from our national resources from politicians.  So how can we fix this problem?  Well by not drinking so much bottled water, we won’t have to spend as much on disposing it.  Then lobby your politicians to support clean drinking water programs, bring back public drinking fountains and outlaw the sale of bottled water next to schools.

Re-usable water bottles are the solution.  We can still drink water on the go, but without polluting the planet while we do it.  Even if you don’t quit cold turkey, by cutting back drastically on bottled water consumption we can all make a huge difference.

There are infinite re-usable solutions out there to carry water with you. They come in all your favorite designs too!

Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you soon.  Subscribe at the top right of the blog to get all future Movie Mondays posts!  Don’t you think more people should know about this?  Share this post on Facebook and Twitter by clicking below.