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The new water bottling plant just opened by Nestle Waters North America in South Dallas uses sleek bottles that use 30 percent less plastic than standard water bottles.

So less fuel is burned trucking the filled bottles to thirsty consumers, mostly in Texas, the company said.

And the 525,000-square-foot plant, which holds its grand opening today, was built to meet environmentally sensitive standards, including skylights over conference rooms and men's room urinals sans water.

But that's not likely to keep Nestle – the nation's largest seller of bottled water – or other bottlers out of hot water with environmental groups.

While any progress is progress, environmentalists say they fear consumers will hear what some call "green-washing" and continue to gulp bottled water with abandon – tossing the empty eco-friendly bottle into the trash.

"It is good that we're seeing more and more corporations making changes," said Gigi Kellett, director of a campaign by the Boston-based Corporate Accountability Institute called "Think outside the bottle."

But "that is drawing attention away from the corporations' role in helping create the problem in the first place."

To many environmentalists, drinking bottled water, instead of tap, is an unnecessary use of scarce resources (the water lost in production as well as oil used in the plastic) that sucks up energy for production and transportation and helps clog landfills. Less than 15 percent of water bottles are recycled, according the author of a study for the Container Recycling Institute, a Connecticut-based advocacy group.

Bottlers counter that their water is most popular with consumers on the go, where no kitchen sink is handy. It also serves as a healthy alternative to sugary sodas (which also come in plastic bottles) and can be a life-saver when the municipal water system is ailing, they say.

Sales figures show the bottlers are winning the debate.

Americans downed an estimated 8.8 billion gallons of bottled water in 2007, up 6.9 percent from 2006, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York City-based research firm that focuses on global beverage sales. (Those figures include the 5-gallon jugs used in water coolers.)

The single-serve segment – responsible for most of those disposable bottles – grew 11.7 percent last year, to nearly 5.3 billion gallons, 60 percent of bottled water sales, said Gary Hemphill, Beverage Marketing's managing director.

He, too, has noticed the industry's environmental gains and sees the push from environmentalists as a factor.

"The green movement has been around for a long time," he said. "In the last year it's gotten extremely hot."

Nestle Waters North America, the Greenwich, Conn.-based subsidiary of Swiss food giant Nestle SA, makes 98 percent of its plastic bottles, said Catherine Herter, a Nestle Waters spokeswoman. That eliminates 160,000 trailer loads of empty bottles that would otherwise be shipped to the company's 23 plants in the U.S. and Canada each year.

It also saves 617,000 gallons of fuel, she said, even taking into account the fuel used to heat the nub-shaped "pre-form" plastic tubes and turn them into bottles.

The new Dallas plant cost $82 million in land, equipment and construction costs and can produce up to 30 million cases of bottled water a year, according to Eric Gustafson, the plant's manager.

Other water bottlers have also made eco-friendly moves.

Half-liter bottles holding Pepsi's Aquafina, the nation's No. 1 bottled water, have 14.8 grams of plastic, down from 24 grams in 2000, said spokeswoman Nicole Bradley of Pepsi Cola North America. That saves more than 45 million pounds of plastic a year, she said. A 13.2-gram bottle debuts this year.

Ms. Bradley said a new recovery system saves 280 million gallons of water each year in the Aquafina production process. Both Plano-based Frito-Lay Inc. and Pepsi Cola North America, in New York, are owned by PepsiCo Inc., of Purchase, N.Y.

Deja Blue water, owned by Plano-based Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, cut the amount of plastic in its bottles by up to 22 percent last year, with an additional 23 percent planned for this year, said spokesman Greg Artkop.

By 2010, the company wants to use 100 percent recoverable or biodegradable packaging, he added.

Those things are great, said Jenny Powers, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "However, it does not negate all of the energy, all of the pollution and all of the waste that could be avoided with the turn of a faucet."

The debate may boil down to consumer convenience vs. consumer environmental concerns.