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Introducing – The story of stuff – bottled water

My cousin Sriram Sarma forwarded the link to the website “storyofstuff.org”. Their latest project of intrigue appears to be the story of bottled water. I found this quite interesting. On behalf of our AquaNation project (about which you can find here – the site is still being designed), I blogged about it here . However I felt selfish enough that I wanted to blog about this again.

Bottled Water – Manufactured Demand

As you watch the very nifty video I am going to post below you will realize that bottled water, like may “smart” phones is an effort to create demand where none exists. The harm with manufacturing demand for items like bottled water is the fact that the life-cycle of something like bottled water causes severe environmental damage.

Bottles are manufactured from plastics which are obtained from refined petrochemicals, i.e., oil, the kind that is now flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and reaching the US coast damaging the environment and livelihood of the people living in the South – East.

Aside from the consumption of oil, huge amounts of energy go into the production, transportation, usage and disposal of these bottles. Of course you know that most of these bottles end up in the landfills rather than being recycled.

The Down-cycle brouhaha and how your bottle ends up in India!

Yes, according to the movie from the story of stuff people, a lot of bottles from California are sent to destinations in countries like India apparently to be “recycled”. However this is not what happens.  To begin with, plastics cannot be “recycled” based on current technology. As such whenever plastics are “recycled”, they are “down-cycled”, that is they come out as a lower grade than where they started.

However, the movie shows a case where plastic bottles from California ended up in a huge mountain pile outside Chennai, an inherent polluter by itself. So, the bottled water is now on it’s way to make it’s unpleasantness felt across the Globe!

Who is the real enemy – tap water or the bottle water touting soft drink companies?

According to the soft drink companies, include Coke and Pepsi (especially hypocritical in nature given their “refresh everything” front), tap water is somehow lower in quality, the enemy and something that will be relegated to a secondary stature “soon” by their campaigns. Only reality doesn’t measure up.

You may wonder – “If this is true, why do so many people drink bottled water?” It is a good question to ask. A lot of us succumb to products that we don’t need, yours truly included. Over years, we tend to forget how and why we ended up making the purchasing choices to begin with. However, it is exactly movies like “The Story of Bottled Water” that wake us to these re-thinks. I did replace plastic bottles with steel bottles by June 2009 itself, so I am almost there in terms of being nearly plastic free with drinking water. If you have not done so, I hope the movie inspires you to do so.

Actions you can take

I am going to regurgitate most of what I wrong under actions at the AquaNation blog, since the actions hold:

1. Carry a re-usable water bottle.

2. Try not to purchase bottled water at all.

3. Discourage the practice of purchasing and using bottled water where possible.

4. If you must use bottled water, please make an effort to dispose off the bottle(s) appropriately.

5. Join a movement, volunteer and/or take action with leadership.

Please watch the movie here:

References:

1. http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/

2. http://www.storyofstuff.org/

Related posts:

1. World Water Day on March 22, 2010 Most, if not all of us have grown in a...

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May 2, 2010  Tags: global drinking water problems, manufactured demand, story of stuff, story of stuff bottled water  Posted in: Causes, Sustainability and Media, water

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