Review: 'Tapped' Drink it up!

Ever since the films like Bowling for Columbine and SuperSize Me were released, everyone wants to make a documentary about something. Unfortunately, we seem to be a generation that can’t seem to do anything right. We eat too much, we are killing too many animals, we are killing ourselves, we drink too much and we drive too much. Evidently, we are really shitty people.

The problem with these movies is that if you actually had the time to watch them, you would probably end up living off the grid or being quite depressed. While the messages of all these movies may be profound, it is sometimes emotionally overwhelming.

With the huge flux in these types of documentaries, I think people are just going to start tuning out. Just like when we lived at home, we can only take so much criticism. I think sometimes we need to just figure things out on our own.

The problem with this is sometimes really important movies get lost in the mix. One of these films is the documentary Tapped, which is about how the bottled water industry is wreaking havoc on our environment. I would hate to think that many people don’t know this, but it turns out it is a message that needs to be talked about. Remember a couple of years ago when we all had those Nalgene water bottles. But then there was a report that there was chemical in them that could make us very sick. Did you know that same chemical is in nearly all the water bottles we buy each and everyday? I did not know that. Shouldn’t that stuff be public knowledge?

While I found the movie to be a little preachy sometimes, I was still floored by some of the facts it produced. Take a look at some of these shocking and disturbing numbers:

• Bottled Water costs 19000 times the price of tap water.
• It is an $800 Billion industry.
• Bottled water is 40% filtered tap water.
• Americans consume 80 million bottles of water a day.
• 30 million of them end up in landfills.
• To produce so many bottles of water, it requires 714 million gallons of oil, enough to fuel 100,000 cars.
• Tap water is tested dozens of times a day. Bottled water companies have to do their own testing, then submit the results. And they are never released to the public.

If you get the chance to watch the movie, it definitely will get the conversation going!