Bring a plastic water bottle to your own risk; the pressure of social belief is forming on you. From big rating documentaries, to the written word and campaigns, the red hot debate in our lives is the terror around bottled water and the waste of resources the industry generates.

The producing, transporting and waste of water in petrochemical plastic bottles eats up huge amounts of water alongside energy, and creates ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases and waste.

Director of the hot new documentary ‘Tapped: get off the bottle’ Stephanie Soechtig states “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 crew behind Tapped are plugging the movie with an across-America roadshow, receiving donations from people to take down their water bottle abuse and swapping their old plastic water bottle in exchange for a reusable stainless steel bottle. Download Tapped from Amazon or iTunes.

Another short film ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ was released on World Water Day in March. From the pen of Annie Leonard of the famous ‘The Story of Stuff’, this new film delves into the process that is used to convincing Americans into wasting over half a billion bottles of water a week, instead of a few cents cost for a drink from the tap. Look up her documentary on You Tube.

In her book ‘Bottlemania’, author Elizabeth Royte investigates one of the greatest marketing heists of this century and demands a strong environmental wakeup call. She asks the questions we must inevitably understand. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water factory seizes your town’s water supply? Is the water coming out of your tap wholly safe? What is really the environmental factor of producing, transporting and waste of a plastic water bottle?

Politicians from everywhere around the international community are beginning to understand that they have to do something – particularly when the meetings where they debate are high consumers of bottled water. How often do we observe a politician in a political debate drinking from a water bottle. Why can’t they might be able to 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 community of Australia to cease the sale of bottled water. Some 60 townships in the United States and some cities in Canada and the United Kingdom have at this point stopped the expenditure of taxpayer funds on bottled water.

It is certain that these dilemmas will be on the agenda during World Water Week 2010 from September 5 to 11 in Stockholm, Sweden, the annual meeting for the world’s most urgent water-related events.

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