The Tapped Tour…helping you to get off the bottle

I have declared it World Water Week…..so here is more on H2O, so that we do not forget how much this valuable resource means to all of us.

Friday I had a chance to meet the women on the Tapped film tour. Stephanie Soechtig is the director of the film and producer Sarah Olson are traveling across the country to show the film and encourage the public to “get off the bottle”…the plastic water bottle that is.

They are wonderful so check the tour map and see if they are coming to your town  and you can meet them too. Be sure to tell them Michelle from Santa Fe says “hi”.

Their tour includes a truck that has a big, almost empty, container that will hopefully be filled before too long with empty single serving plastic containers as people dump their plastic bottles and take this pledge :

BY SIGNING THIS DECLARATION, I PROMISE TO LIMIT MY CONSUMPTION OF BOTTLED WATER. I PROMISE TO BE MORE MINDFUL OF TAKING MY REUSABLE WATER BOTTLE WITH ME. IN LIMITING THE AMOUNT OF BOTTLED WATER I CONSUME, I WANT TO SEND THE GOVERNMENT A MESSAGE THAT OUR TAP WATER IS IMPORTANT TO ME AND I URGE MY LEGISLATORS TO PLACE THE MAINTENANCE OF WATER INFRASTRUCTURE AT THE TOP OF THEIR AGENDA.

Just to make it easier to stick to this pledge everyone will get their very own personal, reusable, very cool stainless steel, BPA free container from Klean Kanteen so that they can fill their own bottles and stop adding to the millions of plastic bottles that wind up in landfills daily.

For more on this be sure to watch Annie Leonard’s newest video, The Story of Bottled Water…it is eye opening as is the film Tapped.

Just in case they aren’t coming to your town or anyplace close by you can still take the pledge online.

Here are some facts from the film, Tapped

-the bottled water industry uses 47 million gallons of fossil fuels each year to produce plastic bottles. Another 450 million gallons is used to transport bottled water.
– if you drank 2 litres of bottled water per day, you would pay $1,400 per year.
– there is an Eastern Garbage Patch in the Pacific twice the size of Texas and is a soup of Plastic.
– the EPA constantly tests municipal tap water and makes reports available to the public every year. Bottled water company tests do not have to be released to the public.
– 80% of the PET manufactured in the US ends up in Nestle, Coke, and Pepsi containers.
– of the 80 million single serve plastic bottles Americans buy, 30 million end up in landfills.
– only about 20% of plastic bottles are recycled.
– by 2030, 2/3 of the world’s people will lack access to drinking water water
– Bisphenol A, BPA,  a chemical found in plastic, has been found to cause heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, attention deficit disorder, ovarian disease, and low sperm count in men.
– Nestle, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola control 60 percent of the U.S. bottled water market, and use municipal supplies (tap water) for three of the four biggest brands, Aquafina, Dasani and the Swiss company’s Pure Life.

The film is inspirational and reveals a lot more than what is mentioned above. It is sure to be shocking to many who assume that what we buy in the store must be safe and better than what comes from our tap. The sad and scary story of bottled water is at last being revealed in this important film. We can all make a difference by not buying into this polluting, exploitive and dangerous industry. Water is our right and as long as we are paying for it we abdicate this important right while we  silently allow our water supplies to continue to be polluted…if we were all drinking tap water we would be demanding cleaner water from the government.

So get started… get off the bottle and get your own. Instead of buying bottled water there are other options even if you don’t like how your tap water tastes. You can always get a home water filter or buy a few large, non-BPA, containers and fill them up from a purified water machine- this is what I do and it really isn’t a hassle. When I travel I bring my own “bottle” (now it will be my Tapped from Klean Kanteen bottle)  and then if I have to I buy one bottled water, the biggest I can find, and refill it again and again.

There are always ways to live more sustainably. We just have to realize how and then DO IT!