The New Tech-Infused Drinking Fountain That Will Reduce Plastic Waste Around the World
4 min read
Imagine a entire world wherever no one particular has to wander much more than five minutes to get clean consuming drinking water, no matter whether they’re standing in downtown Chicago or in a village outdoors Dar es Salaam. That is the vision of HOPE Hydration, a startup that is utilizing technological know-how to try out to eliminate the will need for plastic drinking water bottles.
HOPE has pioneered a water refilling station called the HydroStation. Men and women can fill up their bottles with filtered drinking water, and high-resolution electronic screens provide genuine-time stats about drinking water top quality and the sum of plastic and carbon dioxide that is staying saved by working with the stations rather of plastic bottles. The screens can also integrate advertising and social media platforms so the stations to increase an aspect of interactivity.
HOPE, which officially released in Oct, in the long run wishes to have HydroStations blanketing the world—on the streets, at event venues, in retail environments, in housing developments. A prototype of the HydroStation was in procedure at Promoting Week NY in the drop HOPE partnered with Microsoft and Dentsu on the rollout. The business is in discussions with a 50 percent-dozen towns in the U.S., as nicely as some others internationally, that are intrigued in installing the refilling stations in community locations. The first batch of HydroStations will go into the ground in Atlanta in the initial 50 percent of this 12 months.
“Public ingesting fountains made use of to be commonplace. They were being meeting details and centers for discussion,” says Jorge Richardson, the CEO and co-founder of HOPE. “The dilemma is: What would ingesting fountains search like in the 21st century, in a entirely digital earth? How can we revive this aged concept but in a new way?”
If you desired a drink of drinking water in the mid- to late-1800s, you may well come across you ingesting a beer instead—or many—and, in simple fact, that is what folks did. Beer (and liquor, in general) was considered healthier than the dirty and foul-smelling drinking water that was conveniently readily available. Since of this, temperance groups started out setting up public consuming fountains in city parks to offer an choice.
Right now, several of people fountains no lengthier exist, and alternatively of grabbing a beer, most of us get a bottle of water—but which is become a big issue. One particular million plastic bottles are obtained every moment around the world, and far more than two-thirds of them close up clogging landfills, producing the U.S. the planet leader in plastic squander.
Most of that plastic waste winds up in landfills, and the equilibrium goes into the ocean. In point, a garbage truck’s worthy of of plastic is dumped in the ocean every minute we are alive. Fish take in that ocean-borne plastic, which kills a ton of them (mainly because of the toxic compounds in the plastic). Meanwhile, simply because we eat the fish, we take in the equivalent of a credit rating card in micro-plastics a 7 days. We’re only beginning to explore what that suggests for our well being.
Water is simple and elemental. It’s technically obtainable everywhere you go, flowing under our toes. But there is a capture: “We’ve developed problems all over accessing it,” says the 26-yr-outdated Richardson.
Richardson details the finger at the trillion-dollar beverage sector that is circumnavigating the world in order to get that bottle of h2o to you: Setting up in a person region the place the bottle is manufactured, then at times delivery the bottle halfway close to the globe to fill it with h2o, and then sending the filled bottle to a different place to a corner retail outlet that sells it to you for about a greenback. That cost seems quite affordable except if you consider the fossil fuels and assets applied to generate it, and the fact that the water within normally has been demonstrated to be no cleaner than faucet.
The team at HOPE—which consists of co-founders Cristina Gnecco and Dave Tigue—have backgrounds in sustainability, enterprise progress, and software package and components engineering. They were being introduced with each other by their issues about mounting plastic waste—and their perception that we can innovate our way to a extra sustainable position.
“If prospective funders aren’t excited by drinking water, we excite them with the tech,” suggests Richardson. He details out that towns are remaining pressured to improve their infrastructure, lessen waste, and observe their ESG footprint – all of which a info-enabled drinking water fountain provides, and none of which a bottle of water can provide.
Developing drinking fountains in made nations that presently have water infrastructure is 1 factor. But what about the just one 3rd of the earth that lacks entry to clean up ingesting water? HOPE has a eyesight for that, far too. For every single HydroStation mounted, they lover with NGOs all over the world to finance a h2o undertaking in needed areas.
But as an alternative of making wells, which can break down, they want to change to a more recent technology—the atmospheric drinking water generator, which can pretty much pull humidity out of the air and flip it into drinking water.
“Water will turn out to be a person of the major and most complicated problems of our existing era. It is also one of the greatest alternatives for innovation and disruption,” says Richardson
Revealed March 12th, 2022
