On the anti-bottled-water bandwagon

Plastic water bottles have been getting such a bad rap that people have started paying attention, which means that corporate America has started cashing in.

The company that makes Brita water filters teamed up Monday with Nalgene, a manufacturer of reusable beverage containers, to launch the FilterForGood campaign, aimed at weaning people off throwaway bottles.

"Refilling our own personal water bottle with filtered water from the tap requires far less energy and wastes almost no resources relative to bottled water," said Josh Dorfman, a spokesman for the campaign and the author of "The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living."

He called it "an easy thing to accomplish with potentially big results" -- for the environment and, though he didn't mention it, for sales of Brita filters and Nalgene bottles.

Brita, which is owned by Oakland-based Clorox Co., and Nalgene, a unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. of Waltham, Mass., are two companies piggybacking on Americans' plastic-water-bottle remorse. More than 1.5 million barrels of petroleum go into the production of the 38 billion plastic water bottles Americans toss every year.

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