The Council of Canadians Medicine Hat chapter has created a sculpture made out of plastic water bottles to challenge bottled water.
Chapter activist Jessica Plattner tells us, “We used it as a canopy for the table where people signed a pledge to not use single-use plastic water bottles, and had it set up at a local farmers/craft market for Bottled Water Free Day. Now it is at the public library as part of the World Water Day display.”
The Canadian Press has reported, “The U.S. Container Recycling Institute estimates about 30 million plastic water bottles are thrown away, and not put into recycling containers, every day. The Polaris Institute warns that [in Canada] many plastic bottles end up in landfills ‘or worse, as litter in forests, lakes and oceans’ [and] estimates only 14 per cent of plastic water bottles get recycled in Ontario.”
Plattner says the bottles for the sculpture came from the recycling centre in Medicine Hat – which often processes as many as 20,000 bottles in a single day.
The Medicine Hat, Brandon/Westman, Edmonton, Prince Albert, Chilliwack, Cowichan Valley, Whitehorse, Montreal, Guelph, Centre Wellington, Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, Northumberland, Peterborough-Kawarthas, South Niagara, Sudbury, Windsor-Essex, South Shore, and Kent County chapters are all taking action between March 2 and April 3 to mark World Water Day.
Those actions include: presenting to municipal councils to become a blue community, screening the films Bottled Life, Water on the Table and Above All Else, organizing a provincial all-candidates meeting on water, taking a group-selfie in front of a local river, holding public forums, tabling, holding discussions, organizing a tap water versus bottled water taste test, mobilizing a cross-border rally, and more.
Chapters have also been photographing Nestle bottled water labels across the country to show how far bottled water is trucked outside of the watershed where it was extracted. You can read more about that here.
For details on this year’s World Water Day activities, please click here.
#WorldWaterDay
