A Toast to Eco-Friendly Bottled Water

Certain restaurants -- such as Alice Waters' Chez Panisse -- prefer to use their own glassware. The Berkeley, Calif., eatery was one of the first to remove all bottled water from its menu, serving instead its in-house filtered water in engraved crystal pitchers.

Several cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Salt Lake City have banned the purchase of bottled water at all city offices and are proactively trying to ban or tax the sale of all bottled water within city limits. Behind this campaign is the enormous carbon footprint involved in transporting bottles like Perrier, Evian and San Pellegrino from places as far away as Italy and France.

"The transportation, the pollution, the recycling costs -- there is nothing wrong with drinking water where it is made," says Natura co-founder Marco de Plano, "but it is wrong to transport it and subsidize it all."

Of the 30 million bottles of water consumed every year, about four-fifths of those plastic bottles end up in local trash containers that are then picked up by gas-guzzling garbage trucks and deposited in the country's overflowing landfills, according to a report from ABC News.

Getting the Natura Water system in the hands of residential clients is the next step. Right now, the cost and installation of the machine makes it practical only for households drinking lots of water. A recent quote in the Los Angeles area for an entry-level residential water system was $4,800 with an additional $300 for installation. If a family of four is drinking three liters of water a day, it would take a bit more than a year for the family to recoup the cost of the machine (based on an average of 99 cents per bottle of water). But taking into account the amount of shopping time and gas spent to and from the grocery store, the savings could be greater.