The fabulous "No Impact Man" is helping to publicize a campaign by the Center for the New American Dream to get Americans to Break the Bottled Water Habit.

I love this campaign-it's a great way to make a statement and have a significant impact as an individual consumer.  I've been toting around my reusable water for years, recently upgrading to this hot little purse-sized number.

The campaign's website lists some of the important reasons for giving up single-use plastic water bottles:  bottled water is full of oil, its expensive, and its probably not much better than your tap water, which in most cases is fine to drink.  Many Cities around the country are realizing these problems and taking action-Mayor Gavin Newsom got lots of press for his order to ban the purchase of bottled water by the City and County of San Francisco.

I'd like to highlight two more important reasons to stop buying bottled water:

First, there are environmental justice problems with accepting that buying water in bottles-rather than having access to clean water from the tap-is ok.  Access to clean water is one of the most basic human necessities.  Around 2.5 billion people have no access to improved sanitation facilities and 900 million people lack access to clean drinking water. In 2004 diarrheal disease caused more deaths than HIV/AIDS-the majority of these deaths are among children under 5 years of age.

 If only people who can afford to pay for water in bottles get to drink clean healthy water, this is very unjust for the world's poorest citizens.   Inside the Bottle, a grass-roots campaign to raise awareness about the local and global impacts of the bottled water industry, cites 2006 findings of the Earth Policy Institute:

Globally, an estimated $100 billion US are spent every year on bottled water. Yet it would only take $30 billion to halve the number of people who do not have ready access to clean, safe, drinking water, and achieve one of the Millennium Development Goals established by the UN in 2000.

Second, bottled water contributes to the massive global problem of plastic waste that plagues our landfills and our oceans.  In 2005 in the U.S. alone an estimated 52 billion plastic bottles were wasted-NOT recycled.  Much of this plastic waste ends up in our oceans, where there are gigantic and growing "garbage patches" composed primarily of plastic.  In the North Pacific, pieces of plastic outweigh surface zooplankton by a factor of 6 to 1.  About 80% of this plastic waste comes from the shore, and the majority of that is from packaging, such as water bottles.

Check out more coverage of this issue, featuring this compelling shot from Getty Images: