Portal:Water/Water events

R 1: Marcellus Shale Legislation, Pending Legislation and the Law on the Books

R 2: Marcellus Shale in Pennslyvania

R 3: Marcellus Shale in New York

R 4: Gasland the Movie:  The New Silent Spring?

R 5: Activism Campaigns and How to Combat the Marcellus Shale!

Tapped Or Bottled?:
On World Water Day 2010,the annual UN-sponsored day of action aimed at highlighting the fact that over 1 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water, the United Nations released a report entitled Sick Water, in part criticizing bottled water's carbon footprint. The report notes that it takes 3 liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water, and that bottled water in the U.S. requires the consumption of some 17 million barrels of oil yearly. 

Corporate Accountability International released a seven-minute film entitled The Story Of Bottled Water to coincide with World Water Day. In contrast with much of the world, Americans are lucky enough to generally have access to safe and abundant water from the kitchen tap, but waste an enormous amount of money, energy and resources by drinking bottled water. According to Corporate Accountability International, The Story Of Bottled Water "tells the story of manufactured demand, specifically how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when they can get it almost free from a tap. [T]he film explores the bottled water industry’s attacks on tap water safety and its use of seductive, environmental-themed marketing to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces."

Watch The Story Of Bottled Water at http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/story-of-bottled-water?r=e.

In response to the release of The Story Of Bottled Water, USA Today reports that the bottled water industry has released a news release and youtube video. A Huffington Post article by Jason Linkins lambasts the industry's video as "glorious greenwashing" and says it uses "a pretend reporter from pretend outfit 'BWM Reports' pretending to pose pretend questions in pretend journalistic settings."

Another documentary, Tapped, made by the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car, also highlights the problems related to bottled water, and highlight some surprising statistics:
 * 18 million barrels of oil are used to transport bottled water every year.
 * There is virtually no testing for bottled water. One person is responsible for overseeing all of the regulation of bottled water in the U.S.
 * Only 20% of bottles actually get recycled. Un-recycled bottles often end up in the oceans, adding to a dead zone of plastic that is already twice the size of Texas and growing.

Read more about these issues in a March 22, 2010 Huffington Post op-ed by Edison de Mello, M.D., Ph.D., entitled The Water Bottle Lie and Your Health.

Food And Water Watch is managing a campaign called Take Back The Tap to encourage restaurants, universities, and city governments to break the bottled water habit.

Corporate Greenwashing and World Water Day:
Even though United Nations agencies coordinate World Water Day 2010 and run the official WWD website, Starbucks owns and manages the misleadingly-named website www.worldwaterday.net, which many may mistake for the official UN-Water website. Read more on the World Water Day page. UPDATE: As of March 14, 2010, www.worldwaterday.net routes viewers to www.waterday.org, where the Starbucks connection is not apparent. A cached version of the original page's privacy agreement can still be viewed here.