I live in the marshy metropolis of New Orleans, and there’s some division as to how healthy or otherwise the Mississippi swamp water that comes out of the taps here really is. To be honest, most locals are fine with drinking it straight from the tap, but I’ve seen an awful lot of water filters in homes. Also, when you think about the brain eating amoeba that were found in local water systems this year, you kind of get on board with the filtration set.

The Western world is obsessed with filtered water. You only need be overwhelmed by the choice of brands in your local store to realise this. The other things you quickly realise about store-bought water though: it’s chronically wasteful and there’s all those plastic garbage islands floating around in the ocean. Also: you’re being aquatically mugged every time you buy a bottle if they’re charging you more than a dollar.

That agreed upon, it’s obvious that even the most urbane, soy-latte-chugging city dweller who consumes water that isn’t coming out of their own private spring could use and save wads of money with this little black bottle, going by the name of Water-to-Go.

It’s a water bottle, yes, but in its cap is a space-programme-endorsed filtration system that nixes 99.9% of impurities and contaminants. We’re assuming brain-eating amoeba fall into that number. The everyday pollutants that sneak into tap water, even in developed nations, are easy meat. You can treat 200 litres of water, which by my reckoning is about three or four month’s worth unless you’re a particularly Thirsty Theo.

Now imagine how useful this could be if you’re going to places where you can’t actually drink the local water, which to us sensitive westerners is just about anywhere they have to overdub The Big Bang Theory. If you’re heading to, say, Africa, then shoving this into your hand luggage could save you hours of dehydration and almost eliminate the worries you’d have about your digestive system holding up.

Your health. Your bank balance. Your liberal guilt about landfills. All could be assuaged with one water bottle. If you’re science-minded, you can find out more at www.watertogo.eu and there’s lots of info for none-scientists, too.  

Prices start at £25 for bottle plus filter, with filters costing £14.95 for two. See website for stockists.

If you’re like Shandy Pockets, within five minutes of checking into any hotel room, you’ve exploited all of its natural resources. The TV is on, expensive jars of peanuts have been cracked open, the trouser press is already on its third set of suit pants, etc. That’s the joy of hotels; you can live your life with operational impunity, knowing that you’ve paid someone else to find the tossed-aside remote control, clean up the peanut debris and put out the electrical fire that the fire crew believe started from an overheated trouser press.

Hotels know this.

And so it’s nice that they at least try and rein in our most excessive instincts. Just in case we were considering using three different-sized towels just to have a shave, they have those little green signs: “SAVE OUR PLANET. Every day, millions of gallons of water are wasted washing towels that have only been used once. A towel on the rack means ‘I will use again’. A towel on the floor means ‘Please replace’.”

We at SP are all for this, not least because instead of draping it over the in-room DVD player or hanging it from the light fitting, actually deciding to put a towel back on the rack makes us feel as though we are helping the world on an ‘organising Live Aid’ scale. “Yes,” we think, as we place a slightly damp towel in its right, civilised place, “We have helped someone here today.”

Of course, most guests of hotels have travelled thousands of miles to get there on all manner of carbon-spewing transport, leave all the lights on in their rooms the whole time and are probably there in the first place for a meeting to plan turning the world’s parks into Grand Prix motor racing venues and branches of Nandos. So while we applaud the sentiment, we’re just not sure that reusing our facecloth is actually making us the ecological Titans we like to pretend we are.