Kurt Archer

Often in conversation you may hear comments about growing water shortages, or the fact that bottled water is no better than tap water.  Of course both of these are true, however the depth of this situation is far graver than we imagine it to be. What seems to miss the media’s attention is the massive protests that are led in against water giants like Nestle, Coca-Cola, Suez, Vivendi and others. All over the world, water privatization is on the increase, and at what cost?

The building of dams around the world have displaced millions of people in the 20th century. Water ways, aquafers, and natural irrigation channels are being dried up or pumped into plastic bottles and sold to us. That is like someone coming into your home, stealing your most prized family heirloom, wrapping it in a nice package and selling it back to you at 10x the price you paid for it in the first place.

Is it so hard to keep water healthy and accessible to everyone? It seems that more and more politicians are failing to stand up for what should be their jobs – to protect the basic security of citizens! There certainly is nothing more basic than water.

I just finished watching “FLOW: For love of water“.

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I just watched this Documentary on CBC called Forever Plastic that raised some excellent points about the life we have entered into, it also had some interesting historical facts that are more interesting than others.

Plastics were created in the early 20th century based on various chemical compounds, mostly petroleum based. In fact, Henry Ford rolled out a series of cars based on Soy plastics, he even invented a car fully manufactured from products grown in farms. So why did this trend end and oil based plastics take over? According to the documentary World War 2 is to blame, because they needed quick, cheap plastics for their soldiers, and from then on, the industry was set, and petroleum based plastics became our addiction.

Another interesting revelation made by this documentary is just how much consumers believe that this symbol of a triangle with a 1 (or up to 7) means that it is a recyclable plastic. This is a myth in practical terms. Yes a myth. Just because a product has this symbol does not guarantee that it will be recycled. Many plastics which have the potential to be recycled are not because there is no industry or technology good enough to recycle that product. One such example is clear plastics (not including plastic bottles) such as plastic egg cartons, plastic wrap, a lot of plastic casing/wrapping for the everyday products we buy.

Here is a short video about the struggle against plastic, just keep in mind, that this plastic ends up in landfills, and is not recycled into anything.

The documentary goes far to inform the consumers that the battle against plastics and oil addiction is far from over.  More technology needs to be invested in and onnovation needs to increase and smarter designs standards for materials use in our products needs to be pushed.  At least it is getting some coverage now.