This fall semester, the University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with an international marketing firm, launched the bottled water company H2Orange with a simple but very potent plan: Take water, package it in a tiny replica of the famous University of Texas tower, sell it, donate 40 percent of proceeds to fund scholarships, and call it a day.

But while it is laudable to celebrate the university's heritage and expand its educational opportunities, are disposable plastic bottles really the way to do it?

The bottles will add to the City of Austin's landfills, even as the government works to shrink landfilled waste by 20 percent at the end of the ten-year period these bottles will be on the market.

If H2Orange truly wants to claim that it is benefitting education and the people of Austin, it should take the following actions:

--Ensure that at the very least the University of Texas itself has the capacity to recycle all of these disposable plastic bottles.

--In year two, begin selling aluminum bottles, and make it part of H2Orange's responsibility to endorse their use above the single-use plastic bottles.

--Make supporting the City of Austin's Zero Waste Plan part of H2Orange's purpose, part of its role as a corporate citizen of Austin, Texas at large, and the world.

The following letter also states that, if available, you would prefer a more expensive, but reusable, water bottle instead of the single use version currently on sale. You can edit the letter to tell H2Orange exactly how much more you feel a reuseable bottle would be worth.

And thank you for taking action.