Monday, April 5, 2010
The average person disposes of 168 bottles a year, meaning on average, KU students and faculty contribute more than 5 million bottles to landfills each year. That’s a lot of needless waste. And two women are on a mission to change it.
1,500 water bottles end up in landfills each second in the United States, meaning the average person disposes of168 bottles each year.
As part of a nationwide tour called “Get Off the (H2O) Bottle,” director of the award-winning film “Tapped” will visit Lawrence to raise awareness about the environmental problems associated with plastic water bottles. The first 100 students to show up at the event can exchange a plastic water bottle for a free Klean Kanteen stainless steel bottle. The bottle swap starts at 2 p.m. and will be followed at 3 by a showing of the film.
Corporate Accountability International KU, Environs, KU Recycling and the Center for Sustainability are sponsoring the event.
“We are stopping at places that expressed an interest for us to come,” said Stephanie Soechtig, director of the film. “Campuses are a particularly great place to stop. That’s the generation that will do something. They are more motivated and still believe they can do something.”
The 33-day tour started in San Diego, on World Water Day and will end in Greenwich, Conn., April 23. Soechtig and Sarah Olson, the film’s producer, and their dog, Fellini, are driving across the country to get their message out and fill up their truck with plastic bottles.
Every bottle exchanged is tossed into the back. As of Friday, the truck was carrying 700 bottles; it can hold up to 15,000. Along with collecting bottles, Soechtig and Olson are gathering pledges from people to stop drinking bottled water and conserve. Soechtig said they had 300 pledges on their web site, more than 1,000 on Facebook and endless pages from the road — in all more than 2,000.
“There has been an outpouring of support,” Soechtig said. “We have double the people we had reached two weeks ago.”
The film focuses on issues related to bottled water. Soechtig was initially inspired to advocate for reusable water bottles after learning 1,500 bottles end up in a landfill every second.
The journey for Soechtig has been filled with inspiring support and some disappointing crowds — some nights only 15 people showed up. But Whether it is 15 or 200, Soechtig said, they will continue on, even if it is one person at a time.
“At the end of the day, we are just two girls driving across the country with this movie,” Soechtig said.
For information on the tour and film, go to www.tappedthefilm.com.
— Edited by Becky Howlett
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Comments
Bottles, bottles everywhere
This is such a waste of energy. All these efforts have skated around the soda pop issue because Coke and Pepsi have bought too many scoreboards on too many campuses and paid too many lobbyists to have their name kept out of the paper. Bottled water has been around since about 1990 in any volume and in PET bottles. The bottle was developed for soda pop by Dupont ( accidentally) and how many bottles of pop have been sold since then ? Water is a fraction of that. So why do you think all the attention is on water ? It's healthier than soda, the bottles weigh about half what a pop bottle weighs. Something is going on, there is a campaign by someone to go after water rather than coke or pepsi or mountain dew, whatever. Why ?And why have they convinced so many students that it is a responsible thing to do ? You guys are suckers.
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