Minnesota state government spent nearly a half-million dollars on bottled water.

That's the finding by Corporate Accountability International, a nonprofit consumer and environmental group that has for the past several years pushed its "Think Outside the Bottle" campaign in various ways.

The Boston-based watchdog group determined that Minnesota paid about $475,000 in tax money to bottled water vendors for use by state offices and agencies in fiscal year 2009. The group based its Minnesota figure on a vendor report compiled by the state Management and Budget office.

The group also surveyed four other states and found a wide range of spending on bottled water: Maryland, $200,000; Colorado, $154,000; Oregon, $90,200; and New Mexico, $78,000. A handful of other states were surveyed last year by the group.

Corporate Accountability International says that up to 40 percent of bottled water comes from the same source as tap water. Also, the group adds, tap water is also more highly regulated than what comes in the bottle.

Bottled water, a $10.8 billion-a-year industry in the United States, has been criticized for being too expensive and harmful to the environment because of the waste that bottles generate and the fuel needed to truck the product. Also, critics say, it fails to outperform tap water for taste.

An industry website, www.bottledwatermatters.com, counters that its product is tested 30 times more often than tap water and that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributes more than 19 million illnesses to tap water and none to the bottled variety.

In many ways, Minnesota has been home to various efforts in recent years to reduce consumption of bottled water. Some restaurants have gone back to exclusively providing tap water, and the city of Minneapolis has taken a national lead on public water reinvestment and promotion.