Reflections on The Story of Bottled Water by Annie Leonard

Ahh, Annie Leonard's videos are always so persuasive backed up with facts and figures it makes a very very convincing campaign against bottled water. Not that I’m disputing it or anything, I’m totally supporting the idea of not drinking bottled water. Makes it kinda hard though since we, nearly the whole of the IDES class, have to do 2 different assignments for 2 different other subjects, both to promote bottled water. Well that’s my rant, back to the video, it’s definitely another eye-opener, maybe not as heart stopping as 11^th Hour, read previous posts, but definitely as interesting, especially when she gets to the part that shows where all the supposedly “recycled” bottles go… to the poor people of India... to build another landfill. I thought I would be doing something good if I at least recycle my bottles if I buy them for convenience, but obviously all that effort isn’t even worth it considering most of them are “down cycled to turn them to lower quality products that we’re gonna chuck later” anyway.

Then there’s the thing with the “80% end up in landfill or in incinerators where they release toxic chemicals”.EIGHTY PERCENT??? 8 friking 0 percent????????? Actually I’m not too surprised considering when I walked past the UNSW rubbish bin near the bus stops on Anzac Parade, I saw this huge metal bin like the one that is ¾ my height, and 4 times my body size, overfilled with just empty plastic bottles from Nestle’s Ice Tea, lots and lots and lots of Mount Franklins, Evian, Pump, Powerade in abundance and a whole lot more. The surprising thing was, I never noticed it until I watched this video. And I’m sure it’s not like a one off phenomenon that only happened to be the day I happen to notice it. Plus before they told me it all goes to landfill, I thought at least, there’ll be someone who’ll go through the rubbish and pick up whatever can be recycled. So that misconception was definitely cleared up. Apparently there’s no one… And considering Ms Leonard said “People in the US buy half a billion of bottled water a week, that is enough to circle the globe 5 times”, eighty percent is a lot of bottles to fill the land with.

And you know what’s more ridiculous, she said, “Each year the oil and energy that goes to the bottles produced in Amercia is enough to fuel a million cars, even more to ship across the world and it takes only 2 minutes to drink it”. That’s f****** ridiculous. That’s why my petrol bill is so high. Why are we spending so much resources for something that’s only good for only 2 minutes? WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY????? The more I think about it, the more I wonder why anyone would buy them in the first place? Why did I buy them? Whyyyyyyy???????? So definitely personally, from today, I’m never buying another bottle of water UNLESS!! I have no access to tap water and I’m in serious danger of collapsing from dehydration or (which just happened today) stupid marketing subject force me to buy a bottle of PUMP water so I can do an ad for it for an assignment… (This is why I’m not majoring in marketing… they’re evil people who “manufacture demand” for stuff that we don’t really need).

But that’s personally, so what can we do as a community of designers, even noob as we are? We can plan for recycling drop off points for bottles of water and give them back to the producer. So those companies like COCA COLA who owns like 30% of the water bottled market share, would take responsibility of the waste they produce in this world. But more importantly? We can use a system of bottles of water (with the help of government legislation) that has be reused, and reused and reused again so people can use those bottles for refills and not buying a completely new bottle of water. Sorta like that shampoo bottles from Body Shop and you get discounts for refilling too. More access for public water would also definitely help. So Kevin Rudd… take some actions too!