Earth Matters by Jacqueline Milner – Eliminating Tons of Plastic From our Landfills – March 7, 2011 – Cornwall Ontario

Cornwall ON – Want to save money and natural resources and potentially eliminate tons of plastic from our landfills each year?  Switch to a healthy reusable container for your water on the go.

This small step can be easily accomplished by each one of us.  This is a small change that is helpful to our environment and health.

Helpful to our environment because of the amount of plastic we will not be using which saves resources and great for our health for those of you who leave plastic bottles in the heat of your car which can cause properties to leach out from the plastic into the water which will then end up in the system of the one drinking the water.

I mention this today because I received a note from a friend in Erin Township, north of Toronto who talks about the screening of a film entitled “Tapped” at The Erin Legion, March 16th at 7 p.m.  Now I know this is quite the distance from Cornwall, Ontario however the subject that the film addresses is of interest to all of us regardless of where we live. This film spills the beans on bottled water.  Nestlé Waters Canada, which fills hundreds of millions of plastic bottles with water from Hillsburgh and Aberfoyle every year, apparently pays a teeny tiny sum of $3.71 for every MILLION LITRES of water.  This precious resource is then used to fill millions of plastic bottles and then sold to thirsty people everywhere for more than the price of gas.

‘Tapped’ is an eye-opening look at how we are being legally fleeced for our own water.  This film sheds light on how marketing savoir-faire has made a hugely profitable product out of a priceless public resource. The question is addressed as to what happens to those millions of plastic bottles once they have been drained? According to “Tapped” the bottling industry claims that sixty percent of them are recycled, but do the math and you will quickly get that hundreds of millions escape blue boxes every year to become litter or trash in our landfills.

This is the information that will be of interest to each and every one of you regardless of your designated postal code; Nestlé is currently applying for an unprecedented 10-year permit renewal to take up to 3.6 million litres per day from Mill Creek in Aberfoyle.  Next winter, the makers of PureLife bottled water (aka Nestlé) will be going back to the Ministry of Environment (creators of that token $3.71 per million litre price-tag) to make a new multi-year deal for Hillsburgh water.  Learn what you can do from the Guelph-based water advocates and Wellington Water Watchers who are challenging the Nestlé renewal bids.

The question that comes to my mind is how or why the Ministry of the Environment, a public service body, can support a business or a deal that unnecessarily subjects our Earth to millions of plastic bottles which could potentially sit in our landscapes, waterways and landfills for hundreds of years?

Tapped is being presented by the Climate Change Action Group of Erin in partnership with Credit Valley Conservation.

For more information contact Liz Armstrong 519-833-4676.