Refill, not landfill, please.

I sure hope that you, dear reader, are enjoying the eco-conscious bar soap we discussed last week in my series of green living tips that are easy and, by no means, trendy. So, for this week I challenge us to...

Just Say No to Bottled Water

Yes, I know, this is an obvious tip. If bottled water were a color, it would be red,the exact opposite of green (ba-duh-bum! sorry...). Now, you probably know all about sins of bottled water (Quirky & Co. readers are particularly intelligent), but I'll remind you of them, anyway.

First of all, the plastic bottle it comes in alone does not deteriorate for thousands of years and requires resources to be manufactured. Then, the water inside is transported (using fossil fuels, I might add) and bottled. Those bottles then must be distributed by automobile or any other type of fuel-powered transportation.

I really don't mean to bore you, dear reader, with the process of bottled water manufacturing, but if you'd like to know more, this article is actually quite interesting and does a far better job explaining than I ever could. This is really quite a fuss over something that most of us have access to just by walking into our kitchens and turning on a faucet.

So, my green challenge for us this week to drink absolutely, positively, no bottled water. If we can manage to live without it for one week, why not all of the time? Now, don't worry, dear reader, I used to be a water bottle junkie, myself. So, to make our tap water fete a lot more interesting, here are some lovely gems of reusable water bottles to fill with that ambrosial liquid known as tap water.

I've always had a fondness towards unnecessary objects plastered with Hello Kitty's adorable face. I used to save my allowance as a child (OK, so I still am a child...) for a visit to the Hello Kitty store. This bottle, by Sigg, available at amazon.com , is a slightly more mature way to get my Hello Kitty fix (slightly), but for $44.95, I just may have to keep saving that allowance -sigh-. It's cheaper than buying bottled water for the rest of my life, right?

This bottle, by Nalgene, is much easier on my wallet, with the low price of $10. It's message, "Refill, not landfill," is just so clever that I may have steal, uh, I mean borrow it for the title of this post...