+ Rethinking the Public Drinking Fountain

A 2007 article from Fast Company points out that North Americans spent $15 billion on bottled water. That's not only a lot of petrol to make the plastic, but also requires mountains of energy to transport the more than one billion bottles around the country every week. And on top of that, over 95% of bottles made in 2005 were single serving sized, which has one of the lowest recycling rates of other forms of plastic packaging.

There's a major, and costly, irony with the perception and reality of bottled water. Most people drink it because they think it's healthier than "free" tap water, when the reality is 24 percent of bottled water in 2005 was just filtered tap water packaged by Coke or Pepsi. Most people don't know that federal standards for tap water is higher than bottled, so in some cases it's not even cleaner.

And when you add in the economic strain of bottled, tap becomes much more attractive. A person keeping to the eight glasses a day would spend $2500 a year if they bought Aquafina, and upwards of $10,000 if you're springing for FIJI. The cost of the same amount of tap water is roughly $1.

Considering all that, it seems like a no brainer to stop hitting the bottle, and the people at triplepundit.com have a few interesting ideas about how to overcome the perception problem with the public watering hole.

What could be done to change this? What if the access point was moved away from the bathroom at the sake of being near plumbing and brought closer to a communal area? What if instead of being painting a dismal shade of beige it was modern like an Eames chair or designed by a Philippe Stark-esque type of icon? Perhaps these students could be educated to drink from the water fountain and making the fountain attractive and fashionable could enforce their behavior changes. At the very least, let’s make it a little easier to fill [personal bottles] rather than drink directly from the fountain.

An Eames-style iconic water fountain? Sign me up! Their article highlights this as part of a project and we can't wait to see the results.