The Story of Bottled Water | Promoting Filtering Water at Home

Posted by Rolf Joho on May 30th, 2010 filed in Global Warming

A short film called The Story of Bottled Water by Anne Leonard was released Thursday, which was World Water Day. In The story of Bottled Water, Leonard shows how corporations have convinced Americans to spend extra cash on half a billion bottles of water every week though most people in this country can get it for free. What has now become a $ 5 billion-a-year industry and in chorus threatens public health and the environment is the “Purified” bottled water.

On World Water Day

In an article on huffingtonpost.com, Anne Leonard said she chose World Water Day to release the Story of Bottled Water because World Water Day is:

“a good day to pause and consider the insanity of a global economy where 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water while other people spend billions on a bottled product that’s no cleaner, harms people and the environment and costs up to 2,000 times the price of tap water.”

In The Story of Bottled Water, Leonard compares spending money on bottled water to buying a shrink-wrapped sandwich made by unknown hands costing $ 10,000. She blames multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns commissioned by industrial giants like Coca Cola and Pepsi and Nestle to make Americans afraid to drink tap water.

Bottled water contains toxic chemicals

While people may think they are drinking purified water, The Story of Bottled Water points out that it is often times no safer than the water coming from the tap. It could also be less safe. What can leach into the water inside are the toxic chemicals from the plastic in the bottle.

Water bottles, according to a report on mindfully.org, are made from a variety of plastics, including Bisphenol-A (BPA), a very toxic chemical that leaches into the water in the bottles to some degree. Bisphenal-A, as it turns out, is a hormone disruptor that imitates estrogen and can help cause early onset puberty, declining sperm counts, obesity along with breast and prostate cancer. Five leading manufacturers of baby bottles containing Bisphenal-A were slapped with a billion-dollar class action suit in March 2007.

Filter water at home

Leonard says that bottled water costs up to 2,000 times more than tap water, yet up to 40 percent of bottled water is simply filtered tap water. People can filter their own water at home with products that cost anywhere from $ 15 to $ 120. The Story of Bottled Water lists many other facts about bottled water that Leonard calls “inconvenient truths:

• Bottled water is subject to fewer health regulations than tap water.
• Municipalities often need money loans to cover more than the $70 million it costs to landfill water bottles alone each year, according to Corporate Accountability International.
• Making the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars, not including the fuel required to transport the bottles from the factory.

Use metal to bottle water

The Story of Bottled Water does see a bright side it its argument, however.

Leonard points out that few people are spending money now on bottled water, as numbers are showing a slight decline in sales for the first time ever in 2009. More people are using reusable metal water bottles, passing on bottled water at the store and filtering their own water at home. It will cost you about $ 5.95 to $ 19.95 for steel or aluminum water bottles. Certainly beats a $ 10,000 sandwich.

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