[…] the same folks who brought you Who Killed the Electric Car and I.O.U.S.A. Directed and produced by Stephanie Soechtig, the film gives a behind-the-scenes peek into the bottled water industry and its effects on our […]

@Tom Lauria – Why denounce home water filters? Many water filters on the market today filter out much more than chlorine. Water is not a product – it is a requirement for life on Earth. Bottled water producers want to treat water like a commodity – as your comments indicate when you ask “why is bottled water any different.” Water is not just another widget to be sold at a profit. Tapped points out that part of the marketing campaign of bottled water producers is to exploit the public’s fears of the public water infrastructure, so your comments that water conveys through “old and rusty pipes” is predictable and disappointing. Yes, the pipes need to be upgraded/replaced which is why it’s important to demand this of our elected officials. Because water is already piped into our homes and business, shipping it is inefficient and unsustainable. And by definition, any activity (including shipping) that uses oil, a non-renewable resource, is unsustainable.

Shipping is unsustainable? Every product in America is shipped. Every single one. Why is bottled water any different? So tap water conveys through old and rusty pipes. I think that’s why you talk about people “filtering” it. But why filter it? Because the many industrial chemicals in tap water give millions of thirsty Americans pause. Millions prefer the taste and clarity of bottled water. SOme prefer natural spring water; others want the satisfaction of knowing their purified water is professionally, scientifically purified. (And not some flimsy refrigerator pitcher which does very, very little besides diminishing chlorine.) Why does Captain Planet denounce natural spring water?

@ Tom Lauria – To say that Tapped “exploits” the floating patches of garbage in our oceans is a funny way to word it, as if the floating patches of garbage are some poor, helpless victim that Tapped is taking advantage of, instead of toxic waste dumps that seriously threaten the long-term health of our oceans. The amount of plastic in the ocean, from bottled water and other sources of plastic, has far-reaching ecological implications that will ultimately cascade up the food chain to humans. The difference between bottled water and other sources of plastic is that water bottles are produced to contain water, a substance which is already piped into our homes and businesses by water municipalities for a very reasonable price. Bottling water is inefficient and, in the vast majority of circumstances, unnecessary. Plastic bottles are made from oil, a non-renewable resource. At a time when there is so much awareness of using resources efficiently, why are we using oil to create plastic bottles to drink from, one time, and then throw away where they may end up in the Ocean where they will take 500 years to photo degrade? The production process of plastic bottles creates toxic byproducts (such as benzene, a carcinogen) that are literally killing poor families in communities like the one featured in Tapped in Corpus Christi, Texas. Also, the amount of oil it takes to haul bottled water from wells to bottling facilities to distribution centers to stores is unsustainable as well. Bottle bills promote higher rates of recycling, a proven fact. But whether a person recycles their plastic water bottle through curbside recycling or by returning it to a bottle center to get their deposit back, the bigger picture is that we shouldn’t be drinking out of plastic bottles in the first place. We should be drinking tap water (filtered or otherwise) from reusable containers. Any other model, including plastic bottles, is inefficient and unsustainable.

Here is the FDA’s website on bottled water: https://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm046894.htm – It looks like an ad for the International Bottled Water Association, the organization Tom Lauria represents. There is a quote from the IBWA on the website — why would the FDA promote the IBWA on their website? The FDA is supposed to protect citizens from harm, not promote the industries that make the product. The website states that the EPA monitors tap water and the FDA monitors bottled water, so the earlier comment from JBS that says the EPA monitors bottled water is simply not true. If you read the website you’ll notice a list of bullet points that the FDA requires bottled water producers to do, including sample and test their water for safety. The FDA doesn’t test the water themselves, and the bottled water producers are not required t submit their tests to the FDA in a meaningful way. What this website proves is that bottle water producers are allowed to police themselves with little to no accountability to the FDA. When Tapped took samples of bottled water from the grocery store and sent them to a toxicology lab, the results were alarming. The list of chemicals the toxicology lab discovered in the bottled water would never quality for the “safe and delicious” category. Those “busy people on the go” may be drinking styrene, dimethyl phthalate, and di-n-octyl phthalate with their bottled water. Marketing and ad campaigns from the bottled water producers have tried to convince us that bottled water is safer than tap water, but there have been several re-calls of bottled water over the years due to safety issues, a topic explored in Tapped. When this issue is brought up with the bottled water lobbyist who is interviewed in the film, he claims to have no knowledge of any re-calls, but Tapped has the newspaper headlines to document many of the recent re-calls.

The FDA official who is accountable for bottled water is interviewed in the film, and she herself confirms that she is the only person who regulates bottled water, and she also confirms that she has other responsibilities besides bottled water, so it’s not even her full time job. Municipal water is tested up to 10 times a day for safety, but bottled water is almost never tested, and when it is tested, it’s by the bottled water producers themselves – so, as Tapped so eloquently puts it, who do you trust? The water that is tested 10 times a day or the water that corporations test themselves and then sell to us for a huge profit?

LOL. Good to see that the industry shills have something to do all day, like spread disinformation on the internet. Really guys, you corporate spokesdogs really aren’t very good at being subtle. you stick out like a rotten, corrupt thumb. TAPPED is great.

“Tapped” exploits the ocean gyres to bash bottled water, as if empty bottles were the one and only plastic object involved. The film’s position is misleading and unhelpful. If we can achieve a 100% recycle rate for bottled water containers, there would still be ocean gyres and 99.75% of our landfills would remain unchanged. That’s also a problem with your advocacy of bottle deposit laws — they only deal with bottles! Curbside recycling programs collect everything! Wanna halt the gyres? Then collect everything!

Once again, there is not a single bottled water company that is not regulated by the FDA. “Tapped” is completely in error that 70% escape regulation. Even the FDA testifies before Congress that it has full regulatory oversight over bottled water. And the film’s utter nonsense about only person at FDA regulating bottled water companies is seriously flawed. At the state and local level, there are many food inspectors and compliance officers. “Tapped” is seriously flawed on a basic factual level but anti-bottled water activists don’t care. But serious people do care. Bottled water is a very healthy, very convenient, very delicious food product that — like all other food products in containers — requires recycling.Bottled water does a lot of good for busy people on the go.

@JBS: Yes, the Tapped DVD costs money to buy because it cost money to make, and the filmakers, along with all human beings on the planet, have to make a living. The fact the the DVD is being sold for a price does not discredit the content of Tapped.

Mentioning that Stephanie went to NYU and lives in LA isn’t relevant to the issues raised in Tapped. NYU is a good school, and LA is a cool city – so what?

The devastation caused to the environment and human health by plastic bottled water is undeniable. Trying to dismiss the facts by saying that the bottle water industry only uses a relatively small amount of water is not a coherent argument.

The FDA regulation of the entire bottled water industry is assigned to only one person, and bottled water isn’t that person’s only job. Bottled water companies exploit loopholes in FDA regulations because the FDA can only oversee products that cross state lines, so most bottled water is sold in the state that it was produced in so that it doesn’t have to be regulated by the FDA (not that the FDA has robust regulation for bottled water in the first place).

Listing the various uses of plastic in Stephanie’s promotional tour does not detract from the fact that bottled water is devastating to the environment and our health. Tapped doesn’t say that a person should go through life without ever using or touching a plastic product. Tapped is saying that drinking water out of plastic bottles for the sake of convenience is devastating our oceans, our health and our underground water supplies. In this day and age we all depend on plastics to some degree, but the current practice of bottling water in plastic bottles is simply not sustainable.

The fact that there are patches of floating plastic in the ocean bigger than the size of Texas, in which water samples contain more plastic than plankton, should be a giant red flag that our current system has some major problems, and we ignore them at our peril.

@Tom Lauria: You mention that “so much” of the information in Tapped is wrong, yet you don’t state specifically what information is wrong. You go on to mention curbside recycling, a program bottled water companies are fond of becaues it forces municipalities to pay for cleaning up bottles generated by their industry. Studies prove that the most effective way to promote recycling is through charging a 5 or 10 cent bottle deposit at the point-of-sale to pay the consumer when they return the bottle to a recycling facility after consuming the product. Only a handful of states in the US have a “bottle-bill” and those states have the highest recycling rates in the country. And yet bottled water companies have lobbied against a national bottle bill because they don’t want to take accountability for their product. In economics, when a corporation pushes a negative effect of their product onto society, leaving the public holding the tab, it’s called an externality. The biggest externality of the bottled water industry is a floating patch of empty plastic water bottles in the Pacific Ocean – it’s called the Eastern Garbage Patch, and it’s twice the size of Texas. It will take over 500 years for those floating plastic bottles to break down – not exactly a “higher calling.”

The fact is that corporations, including Nestle, Coke and Pepsi, are treating water as a commodity. If a corporatoin pulled up a giant truck to the Colorado Rockies and sucked all the oxygen out of the air and sold it at an oxygen bar in Manhattan, there would be riots in the street. And yet, corporations are doing the same thing with underground water supplies in small communities all over the country. Heretofore, the amount of water taken out of the ground by corporations may be a small fraction of the total available freshwater in the country, but now they have a foothold in the water-as-commodity business, a business that sold 29 billion bottles in 2007… well, you see where I’m going with this. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, there is enough water for human need, but not enough for human greed.

Thanks to the magic of Google, it doesn’t take “all day” to bear witness to Stephanie Soechtig’s profoundly flawed “Tapped.” So much of the information in “Tapped” is flat-out wrong. The U.S. EPA reports that only 1/3 of 1 percent of the plastic waste stream is due to bottled water containers, which have the highest recycle rate of any plastic product container in single-stream curbside recycling programs. She’s worried about underground water supplies yet it has been verified by the non-profit Drinking Water Research Foundation that bottled water uses 2/100 of 1 percent per year, while the U.S. Geological Survey confirms a 3 to 7 percent annual recharge rate. Where is all this bottled water going? Into people’s bodies. Bottled water is for human hydration only. There’s no higher calling for water. We understand our “empties” are an environmental challenge so we are aggressively working with other industries on new and viable solutions.

“Tapped” the movie proclaims it is on a mission to get people off of bottled water for the good of all mankind. But, on closer inspection, it is less of an idealistic documentary movie than a successful business enterprise. If you doubt this just follow director Stephanie Soechtig and producer Sarah Olsen as they embark on a 30-day/30-city cross-country tour in their custom made truck along with their sponsor Klean Kanteen®. Or maybe you should buy a $19.99 DVD from their movie company, Atlas Films, owned by Stephanie. From the Atlas website: “Founders Michael and Michelle Walrath and Stephanie Soechtig started Atlas with the goal of creating films that educate, entertain and inspire change. With private investments Atlas is able to truly embody the spirit of independent films.”

Facebook Post from Stephanie on April 13, 2010:

Stephanie Soechtig Guess who is #10 on iTunes!? Thanks y’all! So exciting! How high can we climb? How long can we stay in the top 10?? Thank you!

“Thanks Y’all?” The girl graduated cum laude from NYU and lives in Los Angeles . . . .
The “Great Lie” they are foisting upon their audience is the bottled water industry “aims to privatize and sell back the one resource that ought never to become a commodity: our water.” This is an absurd proposition because the bottled water industry uses such a small amount of water for their product and you simply can’t monopolize what you don’t control. “Millions of gallons a day” sounds awfully scary but it is a fraction of 1 % of the clean water resources available in the U.S. and far less than the amount of water simply leaked into the ground by municipal utilities every day.

The second patent falsehood, repeated often, is the bottled water industry is “unregulated.” The bottled water is in fact regulated to a higher degree than municipal water systems by the FDA (using the EPA regulations as a starting point and then going further for stuff like lead) and the various States. And most importantly, unlike tap water, the FDA has zero tolerance for critical violations or temporary spikes in contaminants. The only major difference in the testing regime between bottled water and municipal tap is bottled water companies aren’t required to frequently test miles and miles of leaking pipes for contamination. They don’t have them.

If you ever get a chance to debate with Stephanie during an interview ask her about the divergence between her hateful public stance towards plastic and her real life actions incorporating plastic. The CDs she sells are made of almost pure polycarbonate. The truck she drove on her tour was modified with a Lexan wall to show all the awful water bottles she collected and the roll down poster asking folks to “Get Off The Bottle” was made with polyvinyl. The sunglasses she wore on the trip, the clothing with microfibers, etc., etc. – all plastic.
But what do you really expect from the former producer of Fox Networks “The O’Reilly Factor”, hard facts or salesman’s hyperbole?

Baby, is it me, or are ya’ll just trying to make money . . . .