Tapped - The bottled water documentary

[mikejet]

Tapped official site.

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Do you drink bottled water? Do you know people who drink bottled water? Watch this trailer to the new doc called “TAPPED.” I hate that there is a generation of children being raised right now that only knows bottled water. WTF people – it’s called an immune system. You’ll be okay if you drink tap water. Really – you’ll live. Your kids won’t be mutants. Well – maybe they will from ingesting so much plastic from the bottled water.

Yeah – I know – there are cons to municipal treated water as well, but I think the pros definitely out weigh the cons. Let’s look at bottled water. Most of it comes in plastic bottles. Plastic is made from oil. Plastic leaches into the water. A lot of bottled water is just repackaged tap water (i.e. Dasani and Aquafina). Water is heavy to ship, thus using more oil. If you’re a fancy pants, you’re not drinking this “tap water.” You opt instead for Fiji water because it comes in a fancy square bottle and is shipped from Fiji (where a large percentage of islanders don’t have access to safe drinking water). Perhaps you are even more fancy pants than that and you drink San Pelligrino. Oooh…but glass recycles better than plastic and doesn’t leach. Correct – but it’s heavy – damn heavy! Oh…and it’s a Nestle brand…like they need another water brand. Nestle is like the Phillip Morris of water. San Pelligrino, Perrier, Vittel, Ice Mountain, Deer Park, Poland Spring, Deer Park, Zephyrhills, and of course, plain old Nestle.

When I was growing up, no one drank bottled water. Some might have taken old milk jugs to the grocery store to fill up for $0.25 from their filtered water. Perrier and Evian were the only bottled waters you could buy. Then sometime in the late 80’s it started catching on more and more. At some point there was a mindset projected on the population that you were a bad person if you didn’t drink bottled water. I just don’t understand it.

Water is a precious commodity – protect it – drink it – from the tap. I know it’s hard to believe here in the good old U.S. of A. that there will be wars fought for water, but there will be. It’s the next oil, you know (which we need to package the water for you).

Here's a quick review:

Tapped, a new documentary about the bottled water industry from director Stephanie Soechtig and the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car?, is a pretty damning look at how consumers have been tricked into spending too much money on water packaged in plastic and quite often not as clean as what’s available from the faucet.

I knew bottled water sucks, but I didn’t know it sucks this much. Not only is it a clear waste of resources (only 20 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States are recycled, and far too many of the rest probably end up in the Pacific Garbage Patch), it’s an incredible waste of money for consumers, who pay more than the price of gasoline for water that’s marketed as “pure,” but in reality is largely unregulated, full of harmful toxins like BPA, and far less safe for drinking than free tap water. (In fact, 40 percent of the time, bottled water is nothing but municipal tap water, freed from the government oversight that keeps it safe.)

Tapped, which began a one-week run at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, traces the evolution of bottled water from its hoity-toity Perrier days to its present ubiquity, and succeeds at making the industry reps look like total jerks. A few too many mid-interview cutaways to Soechtig looking concerned came off as a little journalistically self-important, but Tapped does a solid job of covering every aspect of this damaging industry and inspiring more outrage than despair. It features interviews with the likes of Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin and Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), not to mention some footage of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) tearing into an FDA rep at a government hearing.

I will never look at bottled water with anything less than loathing from now on.

This will be an important doc. Catch it if you get a chance.

I drink tap all the time at work. At home though we goto the water store and refill out huge bottle there. At work they have a filtered cooler.