Australian town bans bottled water

"When residents of the Southern Highlands village of Bundanoon called a town meeting a year ago and voted 355 to one in favour of banning bottled water, few predicted the deluge.

Within hours, the bike shop owner and campaign organiser, Huw Kingston, was fielding calls from the BBC, Al-Jazeera and The New York Times. Documentary film crews from Europe were scouring their atlases looking for 'Bundanoon.'

As the first recognised town in the world to replace plastic bottles with free public bubblers, it also earned the ire of the powerful beverage industry, which saw its profits start to fade for the first time last year.

A US lobby group, the International Bottled Water Association, orchestrated an internet campaign on Facebook and Twitter and funded videos on YouTube mocking the residents whom it accused, with little sense of irony, of mounting a 'PR spin campaign'. . ."