Put down that plastic water bottle!

I'm going to ask for two favors:

First, think about the last time you drank bottled water. Were you drinking it to quench your thirst on the run? Were you subliminally drinking it after a nervous project presentation to the corporate? Perhaps you've already hopped on to the alkaline trend?

Are you like my workmate across the hall who 15 minutes ago walked into our office kitchen past the cupboard with glasses, past the water filtration system, and to the refrigerator and grabbed bottled water?

Whatever it was, just think about that bottle of water.

Here's the second favor; Make that the last one you ever drink.

At least, make it the last bottled water you drink because, for many people, there's absolutely no excuse to drink water out of a single-use plastic bottle regularly.

Let me head off those preparing to unleash a rhetorical Drogon on me.

To anyone in Flint, Michigan, or who lives in communities with contaminated water, or to whom bottled water is a necessity born out of some other dire situation, I'm not talking to you.

I'm speaking to those with filtered water refill stations in their office kitchens. Instead of bringing their own reusable water bottle, they choose to pillage the cases of bottled water into their refrigerator.

In fact, I am talking to the office managers who stock it in the first place. I'm talking to every celebrity shilling for fashionable water brands.

I'm talking to everyone who's able to drink clean tap water but chooses to instead drink from single-serve plastic that's currently polluting our beautiful planet from sea to shining sea.

Did you know that every time you drink that 17 ounces of water, the plastic bottle goes in the trash, and it'll stay on the planet for nearly 450 years? Of course, you do—we've been told this countless times.

Oh, what's that? You make sure to recycle every single time? Well, if you have been paying attention, we really can't count on recycling to save us.

Recycling that plastic bottle makes you feel better, yes, but in the words of Inigo Montoya, 'I don't think recycling means what you think it means.' Instead, what if you just didn't use bottled water at all?

I'll admit, the enormity of environmental problems currently facing humanity can easily lead to inaction. The most obvious of these issues are climate change and pollution.

Even if you break up that major catastrophe into smaller pieces, they're still too big for most people to comprehend, or consequently too big for some people to do anything about.

Today, just do one simple thing. Just stop drinking bottled water when you actually don't need to.

For many of us, cutting plastic bottles of water out of our lives is one of the simplest and noble actions we can take to stop polluting our already endeared planet.