by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Some people, including “greenies”, just do not seem to get it about bottled water and even advocate and advertise ethical bottled water on their business pages and such like.
It is not about the bottle so much, as the, theoretically, can be recycled, and even though they are made of oil and leach chemicals, with a few exceptions which are made of a bioplastic of sorts.
It is the water itself that those of us who advocated reusable bottles and tap water are on about and the fact that our demand for bottled water and more so even the promotion of it, often under totally false pretenses, such as claims of bottled water being better than tap water, that is causing a problem to the Planet. A problem worse than all the bottles combined and that is the needless extraction of ground water.
When even supposed leaders in the environmental web world do not understand this message and instead have a go someone who writes regularly at their site as to an article about bottled water being a scourge to the Planet and pull that person's article for reasons of editorial policy then one can but despair as to how the rest is supposed to understand it and get the message.
As long as some supposed green and environmentally conscious folks and websites allow financial concerns such as advertisers come before the truth of the issue of sustainability there is little chance that the real message, whether of bottled water, bamboo or the eco-button, will ever get known and understood by the general public.
Is there any integrity still out there in the media of whatever kind or is just everything advertiser orientated and anything that might upset an advertisers or sponsor, or even a future advertiser or sponsor, must not be written about. So one cannot mention the wrong policies of the Starbucks shareholders, for instance, and such like.
That is censorship and an editorial policy against which I, for one, have always stood and this was one of the reasons why Tatchipen Media was founded in the first place. Namely to bring the truth to the readers, however unpopular that might be with whoever.
Too many a product review or book review is done to please the producer or vendor rather than truthfully informing the reader, be this in a newspaper, a print magazine or an online publication. Honesty and integrity seems to have fallen by the wayside in many such instances and readers are being told half-truth or outright porky pies.
At Tatchipen Media our loyalty and integrity is towards the reader and only the reader and we also will only endorse products and services that we are happy with and only after we have been able to thoroughly test them, where testing is possible, and this will remain our policy.
© 2010
