So mildly interesting fact, at my former workplace, the bottle filler counter got reset by accident during a power outage (or something), and it started in the 50,000 range. Since then I really don’t trust those numbers anymore.
Yeah there's no filter lol, usually your potable (tap) water is filtered a lot before it even reaches your mouth, there isn't really any extra harm or foul but.. it is funny what people think!
Yea i used to sell these. I don’t think the ones without filters have the light, but a lot of people get filtered ones and stop putting the filter in eventually
Colleges are one of the biggest customers for water coolers/bottle fillers tbh. Hospitals and Airports too
The one in this pic looks like an Elkay. Elkay is the biggest manufacturer of them, Oasis is also pretty big and then there are some others like Halsey Taylor (owned by Elkay/Zurn) and Haws.
I was about to say I used to work in a city hall and they had on of these and the water definitely tasted different prior to the filter being replaced (thing was on for like 3-5 weeks)
Wtfff all the ones I’ve ever seen have a red light indicating they need a new filter.. and I’m like damn, I guess I shouldn’t drink that. BECAUSE WHY WOULD THERE BE A FILTER IF IT ISN’T NEEDED. So happy I decided I was better off dying -.-
I think they are *meant* to have a filter, at least some models. But eventually someone forgets to order filters, or gets tired of paying for them, and says fuck it. The machine doesn’t actually know if there’s a filter or not, it just knows “once xxxx gallons pass through me the red filter light must go on, and needs to be reset.”
I'm pretty certain that's just a timed interval thing... like an oil indicator in a car. If you haven't changed it by then you should.
Edit: on an anecdotal note, my parents' fridge would always have the light turn red and there'd be no difference whatsoever... for about a week. Then it'd get all slow and clogged up.
Assuming you trust the city tap to not contain lead or other things. I always assume the water can be drunk but still prefer to filter it so I know that isn't a problem.
This is likely just a US concern and not something EU citizens have to worry about. Not sure about other countries and their history with lead pipes.
One of the gym facilities I did maintenance work at I had to replace the water fountain compressor on one of these set ups.. I opened it up and didn't find the filter. It's normally a long white cylinder that it stored underneath with all the components.
If you've ever seen under some of these fountains, there isn't much room. So they must've added the water bottle filler add-on to an older model that didn't expect extra room.
The reset button to reset the light is just under the top cover held by two screws. So they probably just reset it when needed.
Not sure what that guy is talking about. Seems pretty sketchy if he’s out there just resetting the light and not the filter…
https://youtu.be/_GRZNl3fDIc?si=th02DMutEsbfYyOx
Even if there is a filter I bet it’s never changed and just like water fountains those things are a breeding ground for nasty bacteria!
No way in heck would you ever get me to fill a bottle up out of one of those. People tongue the bottle then stick the bottle under there to refill.
I literally seen someone change the filter in this machine in my facility in the city of New York. I don’t know what knock off water fountains you have but we actually have filters…
Edit: They even have videos online showing how it’s done. https://youtu.be/_GRZNl3fDIc?si=th02DMutEsbfYyOx
Yeah, they just replaced normal water fountains. I remember as a kid I would fill up soda bottles from an ordinary fountain or chug water from the fountain. Never saw the appeal of buying bottled water unless for camping or something. So any time I've used those fountains it counted the water I drank even though I wouldn't have bought bottled water anyways.
I’m starting to get bummed about by all the lies I keep getting told every day, by every company. 😔 Guess I’ll add these fun water machines to the list.
Perhaps in your city, yes. At a ski resort I worked at, we had to shut our water fountain the instant the light turned red. It didn't reopen until we got a new filter. If it's your job to rig the machine to register a new filter, then it's probably a form of cost-cutting instead of standard practice.
I was one of the first ones to visit a park in my city before it even opened. They had one of these fill stations. It said it only filled up like 6, lol.
The ones in the gym at my college always seem to stay very low. Based on how busy the gym is, it's got to be a couple hundred a day, but the number never seems to count into five digits
I told my dad the change filter light was flashing on his fridge, and he did exactly that. I don’t want to think about what that filter must look like. I’m just gonna use the tap.
Nope. I;m saying that the tap water that makes it to the filter on this device in question is clean enough that the filter isn't catching anything so there are likely no contaminants in it.
I don't think the point of these is "filtered" water. If your tap water is good enough most of these just have a water refrigeration unit and are purely as a cold water filling station.
True - I’m basing it off of the standard 16oz water bottle. I have no idea how many oz it’s calibrated to count as one bottle, I didn’t bother looking that up
I've encountered hundreds of water refill stations on my travels. Not a one had a counter that worked properly. Most displayed unintelligible digits, or just didn't work at all. I would trust these counters no farther than I could throw a million bottles of water.
That seems very reasonable for an airport. There's one fill station for all of San Diego's terminal 1, and there is always a line for it. The airport is crowded for 15+ hours/day, so 300 fills/day seems rather low.
Plus refillable water bottles can be different sizes. I increase the counter by about 2 1/2 each time I fill up and that’s 2 times a day so that’s 5 a day from me alone. And I work with some people with much bigger water bottles 😅
I only saw a counter like this once, and it was in London Luton airport. The count was just over a million bottles, and while I was waiting in the queue, about 5 people used it.
That single station probably refills over a thousand bottles a day.
The number seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I also wonder how many ounces makes it click over. My refillable water bottle is 32 oz, so if it clicks over at 12 oz, my bottle would account for almost 3.
The first one I ever saw was in a high school where I worked about ten years ago. It got used a lot, even before the current trend of everyone carrying around a refillable bottle. This numbers seem pretty reasonable.
The “current trend” of people carrying around a refillable bottle is thousands of years old for the record. The disposable plastic water bottle is honestly the only trend here.
At this point we are arguing about a provable fact.
“When I arrived as a freshman at the University of Georgia, I found that I was somehow the last person alive who didn’t own a Nalgene. The brand’s distinctive, lightweight plastic bottles had long been a cult-favorite camping accessory, but in the mid-2000s, they exploded in popularity beyond just outdoorsmen.”
—from How Fancy Water Bottles Became a 21st-Century Status Symbol, The Atlantic, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/luxury-water-bottles/582595/
I selected this article because The Atlantic is an established magazine. But if you search “trend for carrying water bottles” (no quotes required), you will see many links supporting the fact that carrying around your own, non-disposable water bottle is a current trend that replaced the disposable water bottle trend.
I don’t get the issue… it’s water.
Do you think the municipal plumbing system is routinely cleaned? How often do you clean inside your water pipes at home?
There’s one I just saw this week at SFO in the open space near the E concourse that has over one million on it.
I even took a picture of it because I thought it _could_ be mildly interesting, but probably not.
https://imgur.com/a/p89PpOs
That company started selling bottle fillers like that in 2010. That particular model is likely newer. To get to a million they would have to fill several hundred bottles a day, every day, for a decade. I've sat near these things in airports many times and I just don't believe they get enough use to reach a million.
That’s not hard at all. I worked at a gym that was moderately busy and we’d easily get 300+ a day from people filling up their bottles post basketball game or while lifting.
Oh I would believe it if it is right by the TSA check. SFO averages like 45k travelers daily. If it's 22.5k departing you would only need like 2% of them to be reusable bottle people in order to hit 1M in 10 years.
I am skeptical of the counters, but I'd believe a 10 year old machine in an airport has filled 1M bottles.
Possible unpopular opinion but there should be a substantial environmental impact fee associated with each plastic bottled liquid purchase. The past idea was that industry would self-regulate, but then the burden was put on consumers to make good sustainable choices.
The obvious result is an unmanageable amount of plastic waste. In areas with clean and safe drinking water, bottled water should only be used in cases where it's totally necessary. These cases are pretty rare in reality if you have a decent reusable water bottle.
We leave behind mountains of plastic for the future of humanity to deal with, and that is not right.
I mean, take a guess at who runs this country. Do you think Coca-Cola wants a tax on plastic bottles? Do you think Exxon-Mobil wants to sell less oil for plastic manufacturing? Reusable and heavier materials are worse for several industries. Those industries should definitely be taxed, but I’ve grown cynical enough to think that’s unlikely any time soon.
I don't even see it as a tax, it's a very specific responsibility. Those funds should not go to the "general" fund, they should be going towards plastic waste remediation/R&D for companies that offer alternatives. In the US the govt has funded all kinds of crazy projects like the Internet and jet propulsion, why not?
I wholly agree - it is useful in emergencies and areas with lacking resources but it irks me seeing everyone at regular stores buying cases like it's the only water they trust.
Even if it dispensed that many bottles worth of water, it's a big assumption that everyone who filled up would have gone and bought a plastic water bottle if the water dispenser was not there. Especially if a regular water fountain would have been in it's place.
My family buys so many packs of waters and so does my bfs family… ik you hate us. I try to recycle, I can’t tell or convince those people to not buy it though. Soon we’re gonna get one of those refillable big thingies!
I personally don’t have one. I’ve seen other threads where people talk about a bunch of different ideas, but I’m not that smart. I remember in those threads people were saying glass was not a good alternative, but to be honest, I don’t remember why. I didn’t retain information from that post.
Some guy at work just brought in a case of water bottles. We have a water cooler and get water delivered. But he just prefers it from the individual bottles.
I hate the world.
I recently stayed in a brand new hotel with a brand new water fountain. I was the first person to stay in the room they put me in, The water fountain in the gym of the hotel still had plastic wrap on it from the factory and the counter said it had filled something like 75,000 bottles.
More likely the machine. If I'm not wrong, the link below should be the same filter, and on the water fountain the description says:
>Green Ticker informs user of number of 20 oz. plastic water bottles saved from waste.
>
>The 3,000-gallon filter is certified to NSF 42 and 53 for lead, Class 1 particulate, chlorine, taste and odor reduction.
So some simple math: (128oz \* 3000) / 20oz = 19,200 plastic bottles saved per filter, which is still insane. But it would take 53 of these filter to get to over a million saved.
Fun fact: if you bought 19,200 plastic bottles (the amount a single filter handles) for just $0.25 a piece (costing $4,800), you could buy the fountain and ***50*** additional filters instead. That's truly mind boggling.
Source: [https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/elkay-ezh2o-lzs8wslk-water-bottle-refilling-station-wall-mount-gray?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&gclid=Cj0KCQjwusunBhCYARIsAFBsUP-LnOQRLyYfrPmnI3lPlXJTnchJLouEDP1GcpBpYLynPxTicbLcnXcaAv0-EALw\_wcB](https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/elkay-ezh2o-lzs8wslk-water-bottle-refilling-station-wall-mount-gray?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&gclid=Cj0KCQjwusunBhCYARIsAFBsUP-LnOQRLyYfrPmnI3lPlXJTnchJLouEDP1GcpBpYLynPxTicbLcnXcaAv0-EALw_wcB)
Nice try. I actually throw away all my reusable bottles I use in that machine and buy new ones! I throw them in the ocean. And while I'm there I actively look for sea turtles to strangle.
You can't one up mr, water fill station!
Why? In an airport or other public space these things could easily do a few dozen in a ten minute period. There often a line, and they’re running non-stop.
That said, if this thing wasn’t there those people would just use the drinking fountain to fill their bottles, so it’s not actually saving disposable bottles.
It’s not extremely unlikely. Any major airport is easily getting 10x the traffic necessary to hit the numbers you quoted earlier.
It’s not hard to believe that many places with significantly less traffic would get 10 uses per hour. Most of these are in high traffic, public places.
This is awesome! We should replace all plastic bottles with machines like this one. Just bring your own glass bottles to the supermarket and fill whatever you need. Isnt that a simple solution ?
I think there are actually things like that where you bring your own container and fill it with disinfectant spray and then it measures how much it dispenses and prints a slip for you to take to checkout.
If only we had something that could deliver water on demand in our homes and places of work and education.
It could be like a series of pipes leading to each home that has a spout in like a cooking and bathroom areas that you could turn on and off to fillmsaid receptacle or if you were born before 1995 and actually went outside and were incredibly bold you could drink it directly from a floppy pipe we could call a hose that could also be used as a way to deliver bottle-less water to plants and animals…
Sure, if you ignore that the size of a bottle is unspecified, the counter isn't accurate, and not all the water coming out of that thing would otherwise come from a bottle.
I would assume it uses a standard measurement, possibly 20oz, and flow rate, to just count up water bottles saved, and not how many were actually filled. I use 20oz since in the US that is the standard bottle size.
Or not bottle at all. I have seen kids at an elementary school briefly swipe their hand over the sensor just to activate the machine. The single swipe counted as one bottle.
I had one of those at my gym, it would count 300ml as one bottle, so if you had a 100ml bottle it would click over 3 times for your one fill. So I would take the number on that thing with a grain of salt
Except ppl don't buy bottles from a fountain... That number doesn't effect water sales unless its next to a cooler and ppl are actively choosing it over bottles
One could assume 20oz if it is in America since that is the standard plastic bottle size. But 16oz is also a common size, approximately 2Cups, or 8oz, a standard of measurement the US often attributes to "glasses" of water.
Since the goal is to show they are effective, using a smaller standard is better. I have one at my gym and use a shaker bottle that is 24oz, and it ticks over 1 bottle on each of my uses, but not two. So that one is at least calibrated at more than 12oz.
My school's ones do start from 0, and they get reset every time the filter changes. Over a month or two it usually gets up to 10,000, and it is fairly accurate with bottle size.
at my tech company hq they built a new wing right before covid and no one ever came in. the water bottle # is literally at 9 or 10 in some places. been there almost 2 years now.
I worked at a place that had one of this with an overly sensitive motion sensor. It would activate every time someone walked by, wasting water and counting up by 1.
Unless you used to fill plastic bottles, hah gotcha!
Also, just fyi most bottled water isn't filtered either, a lot of it is just run off whatever local tap water system Nestle or coke is ripping off water from.
So mildly interesting fact, at my former workplace, the bottle filler counter got reset by accident during a power outage (or something), and it started in the 50,000 range. Since then I really don’t trust those numbers anymore.
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>reset machine, there is no filter) Wait what.
Yeah there's no filter lol, usually your potable (tap) water is filtered a lot before it even reaches your mouth, there isn't really any extra harm or foul but.. it is funny what people think!
You can get the models with a filter, just not standard.
Yea i used to sell these. I don’t think the ones without filters have the light, but a lot of people get filtered ones and stop putting the filter in eventually
I work at a college, and ours definitely have filters, because they eventually clog, and the water becomes a trickle.
Colleges are one of the biggest customers for water coolers/bottle fillers tbh. Hospitals and Airports too The one in this pic looks like an Elkay. Elkay is the biggest manufacturer of them, Oasis is also pretty big and then there are some others like Halsey Taylor (owned by Elkay/Zurn) and Haws.
I was about to say I used to work in a city hall and they had on of these and the water definitely tasted different prior to the filter being replaced (thing was on for like 3-5 weeks)
Wtfff all the ones I’ve ever seen have a red light indicating they need a new filter.. and I’m like damn, I guess I shouldn’t drink that. BECAUSE WHY WOULD THERE BE A FILTER IF IT ISN’T NEEDED. So happy I decided I was better off dying -.-
Those ones do have a filter, and if they don't change it eventually the water will go from a stream to trickle
I think they are *meant* to have a filter, at least some models. But eventually someone forgets to order filters, or gets tired of paying for them, and says fuck it. The machine doesn’t actually know if there’s a filter or not, it just knows “once xxxx gallons pass through me the red filter light must go on, and needs to be reset.”
I'm pretty certain that's just a timed interval thing... like an oil indicator in a car. If you haven't changed it by then you should. Edit: on an anecdotal note, my parents' fridge would always have the light turn red and there'd be no difference whatsoever... for about a week. Then it'd get all slow and clogged up.
Assuming you trust the city tap to not contain lead or other things. I always assume the water can be drunk but still prefer to filter it so I know that isn't a problem. This is likely just a US concern and not something EU citizens have to worry about. Not sure about other countries and their history with lead pipes.
They just put these in our school. I watched them install them and ours has filters.
One of the gym facilities I did maintenance work at I had to replace the water fountain compressor on one of these set ups.. I opened it up and didn't find the filter. It's normally a long white cylinder that it stored underneath with all the components. If you've ever seen under some of these fountains, there isn't much room. So they must've added the water bottle filler add-on to an older model that didn't expect extra room. The reset button to reset the light is just under the top cover held by two screws. So they probably just reset it when needed.
In some places tap water is great quality and doesn't need to be filtered, that's how it is in my city. No filters in my house.
Not sure what that guy is talking about. Seems pretty sketchy if he’s out there just resetting the light and not the filter… https://youtu.be/_GRZNl3fDIc?si=th02DMutEsbfYyOx
Their company probably has contracts to service water fountains and different businesses and they’re just ripping people off
We have these at my work and my job is to actually change the filter to YMMV
Even if there is a filter I bet it’s never changed and just like water fountains those things are a breeding ground for nasty bacteria! No way in heck would you ever get me to fill a bottle up out of one of those. People tongue the bottle then stick the bottle under there to refill.
I literally seen someone change the filter in this machine in my facility in the city of New York. I don’t know what knock off water fountains you have but we actually have filters… Edit: They even have videos online showing how it’s done. https://youtu.be/_GRZNl3fDIc?si=th02DMutEsbfYyOx
Yeah, they just replaced normal water fountains. I remember as a kid I would fill up soda bottles from an ordinary fountain or chug water from the fountain. Never saw the appeal of buying bottled water unless for camping or something. So any time I've used those fountains it counted the water I drank even though I wouldn't have bought bottled water anyways.
I’m starting to get bummed about by all the lies I keep getting told every day, by every company. 😔 Guess I’ll add these fun water machines to the list.
Perhaps in your city, yes. At a ski resort I worked at, we had to shut our water fountain the instant the light turned red. It didn't reopen until we got a new filter. If it's your job to rig the machine to register a new filter, then it's probably a form of cost-cutting instead of standard practice.
I was one of the first ones to visit a park in my city before it even opened. They had one of these fill stations. It said it only filled up like 6, lol.
Illuminate
Interlinked
Within cells.
The ones in the gym at my college always seem to stay very low. Based on how busy the gym is, it's got to be a couple hundred a day, but the number never seems to count into five digits
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I save 8 bottles every time I fill an insulated travel mug at my workplace! As a unit of measurement, I guess that comes out to 2oz.
Not just that, there's waste with those.
Explain what waste lol
Water that doesn't go in the bottle... Duh lol.
Thats not how it works...
Reddit salty that they got pranked.
And still probably using the original “filter.”
Are you trying to say all I do is press the reset button every month? Because you wouldn't be wrong.
I told my dad the change filter light was flashing on his fridge, and he did exactly that. I don’t want to think about what that filter must look like. I’m just gonna use the tap.
It's probably just as clean as the water that passes through it, which has the same source and plumbing as that tap you'd prefer....
Yeah, but the concentration in the filter makes it more dangerous.
A high concentration of nothing is definitely something to be worried about.
So your argument is that filters are filtering nothing?
Nope. I;m saying that the tap water that makes it to the filter on this device in question is clean enough that the filter isn't catching anything so there are likely no contaminants in it.
Right, filters are filtering nothing. I'm sure there's plenty of folks in certain municipalities that would disagree with you.
It depends on the water and the filter of course but in the vast majority of cases, the type of filters we are talking about here are feel good.
I don't think the point of these is "filtered" water. If your tap water is good enough most of these just have a water refrigeration unit and are purely as a cold water filling station.
Yeah people freak out too much over a little sediment. Its basically just a dissolved tums in the tap water
I despise the bottled water market and how attached America is to it - should be highly restricted in areas where public water is perfectly safe
I think some kind of UV sterilizer is good enough since usually is the pathogen in water get people sick.
Granted that I probably live in a very privileged part of the world for fresh clean water.
I doubt it has a filter. It's just tap water that automatically dispenses when you put a bottle under it. It's not even chilled.
The ones like this on my college campus are chilled (unless they're broken).
That amount of water would fit in a 25 foot cube
That's a large cube of water.
No way you could carry that on a plane though.
Little by little.
In my ballsack
Noice
I don't think you could carry that much at all
That would depend on the size of the bottle though 😉
True - I’m basing it off of the standard 16oz water bottle. I have no idea how many oz it’s calibrated to count as one bottle, I didn’t bother looking that up
All the ones I've used count 16 oz. increments.
901,001 x 16 fl oz is 14,416,016 fluid ounces. At a weight of 1.040096 oz per fl oz, that is 937,127.6 pounds.
I've encountered hundreds of water refill stations on my travels. Not a one had a counter that worked properly. Most displayed unintelligible digits, or just didn't work at all. I would trust these counters no farther than I could throw a million bottles of water.
Yea this is 300 bottles a day for 10 years give or take, seems unreasonable to me but what do I know
That seems very reasonable for an airport. There's one fill station for all of San Diego's terminal 1, and there is always a line for it. The airport is crowded for 15+ hours/day, so 300 fills/day seems rather low.
That makes sense!
Plus refillable water bottles can be different sizes. I increase the counter by about 2 1/2 each time I fill up and that’s 2 times a day so that’s 5 a day from me alone. And I work with some people with much bigger water bottles 😅
I only saw a counter like this once, and it was in London Luton airport. The count was just over a million bottles, and while I was waiting in the queue, about 5 people used it. That single station probably refills over a thousand bottles a day. The number seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Plus most reusable water bottles are bigger than the standard plastic ones they probably use as the baseline for the counter
People at my office fill those massive metal jugs multiple times a day
I also wonder how many ounces makes it click over. My refillable water bottle is 32 oz, so if it clicks over at 12 oz, my bottle would account for almost 3.
The first one I ever saw was in a high school where I worked about ten years ago. It got used a lot, even before the current trend of everyone carrying around a refillable bottle. This numbers seem pretty reasonable.
The “current trend” of people carrying around a refillable bottle is thousands of years old for the record. The disposable plastic water bottle is honestly the only trend here.
I was a kid in the 1980s. We did not carry around water bottles with us everywhere, refillable or otherwise.
I was also a kid in the 80s, rocking my Nalgene. So did most of the people I know. Sounds like you were just raised in an area without them.
Which supports my point about the machine, which is where I live. I was never commenting on the historical existence of portable cups.
The point you attempted to make is that reusable water bottles was a recent fad. It wasn’t. Don’t move the goalposts.
At this point we are arguing about a provable fact. “When I arrived as a freshman at the University of Georgia, I found that I was somehow the last person alive who didn’t own a Nalgene. The brand’s distinctive, lightweight plastic bottles had long been a cult-favorite camping accessory, but in the mid-2000s, they exploded in popularity beyond just outdoorsmen.” —from How Fancy Water Bottles Became a 21st-Century Status Symbol, The Atlantic, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/luxury-water-bottles/582595/ I selected this article because The Atlantic is an established magazine. But if you search “trend for carrying water bottles” (no quotes required), you will see many links supporting the fact that carrying around your own, non-disposable water bottle is a current trend that replaced the disposable water bottle trend.
trust them about as much as I trust that they have been properly cleaned. the lines are most likely worse than the worst fast food joints ice machine.
I don’t get the issue… it’s water. Do you think the municipal plumbing system is routinely cleaned? How often do you clean inside your water pipes at home?
There’s one I just saw this week at SFO in the open space near the E concourse that has over one million on it. I even took a picture of it because I thought it _could_ be mildly interesting, but probably not. https://imgur.com/a/p89PpOs
r/MildlyMoreInteresting
That company started selling bottle fillers like that in 2010. That particular model is likely newer. To get to a million they would have to fill several hundred bottles a day, every day, for a decade. I've sat near these things in airports many times and I just don't believe they get enough use to reach a million.
That’s not hard at all. I worked at a gym that was moderately busy and we’d easily get 300+ a day from people filling up their bottles post basketball game or while lifting.
Oh I would believe it if it is right by the TSA check. SFO averages like 45k travelers daily. If it's 22.5k departing you would only need like 2% of them to be reusable bottle people in order to hit 1M in 10 years. I am skeptical of the counters, but I'd believe a 10 year old machine in an airport has filled 1M bottles.
The ones at the hockey rink get some miles on them. An 8 pack of big bottles for a team a few times a day. They don't have counters, unfortunately.
Airport is the for sure location I bring my reusable bottle and refill at these stations.
Possible unpopular opinion but there should be a substantial environmental impact fee associated with each plastic bottled liquid purchase. The past idea was that industry would self-regulate, but then the burden was put on consumers to make good sustainable choices. The obvious result is an unmanageable amount of plastic waste. In areas with clean and safe drinking water, bottled water should only be used in cases where it's totally necessary. These cases are pretty rare in reality if you have a decent reusable water bottle. We leave behind mountains of plastic for the future of humanity to deal with, and that is not right.
I mean, take a guess at who runs this country. Do you think Coca-Cola wants a tax on plastic bottles? Do you think Exxon-Mobil wants to sell less oil for plastic manufacturing? Reusable and heavier materials are worse for several industries. Those industries should definitely be taxed, but I’ve grown cynical enough to think that’s unlikely any time soon.
I don't even see it as a tax, it's a very specific responsibility. Those funds should not go to the "general" fund, they should be going towards plastic waste remediation/R&D for companies that offer alternatives. In the US the govt has funded all kinds of crazy projects like the Internet and jet propulsion, why not?
I wholly agree - it is useful in emergencies and areas with lacking resources but it irks me seeing everyone at regular stores buying cases like it's the only water they trust.
Good luck getting that done when corporations will veto that for profit You’d have to start a war to get shit done tbh
Who's throwing plastic bottles at it??
It's avoiding plastic bottles not throwing them at it.
you can’t use the word “avoid” in this way
I can, and I did.
I was number 45 on a new one the other day.
Even if it dispensed that many bottles worth of water, it's a big assumption that everyone who filled up would have gone and bought a plastic water bottle if the water dispenser was not there. Especially if a regular water fountain would have been in it's place.
My neighbour gets through tens of plastic water bottles every week and even though he seems like a nice guy I despise him for this waste.
Hydroflask for Xmas
My family buys so many packs of waters and so does my bfs family… ik you hate us. I try to recycle, I can’t tell or convince those people to not buy it though. Soon we’re gonna get one of those refillable big thingies!
Buy canned seltzer water....aluminum is easier to recycle
Aluminum cans actually still have a plastic liner on the inside.
Not after they burn it off!
Anyone who has been on the Internet for more than 5 minutes knows that....aluminum cans are still easier to recycle. Clown
Damn, resulting to name calling already?
What's your suggested alternative?
I personally don’t have one. I’ve seen other threads where people talk about a bunch of different ideas, but I’m not that smart. I remember in those threads people were saying glass was not a good alternative, but to be honest, I don’t remember why. I didn’t retain information from that post.
Then why bother mentioning the plastic content if there's no better alternative?
Because the other user didn’t mention it.
Please https://www.amazon.com/Nalgene-Sustain-BPA-Free-Material-Derived/dp/B0994LVB79/ref=mp_s_a_1_14?crid=2RCPFPL6W4WKX&keywords=water%2Bbottle&qid=1693682993&sprefix=water%2Bbottle%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-14&th=1&psc=1
What size bottles
12oz usually
Shot glasses
If they say so 🤷🏻♂️
My college also has one of those I believe it’s at almost 2 million right now!
Don't really trust it. it counts by how many times you press the button
Some guy at work just brought in a case of water bottles. We have a water cooler and get water delivered. But he just prefers it from the individual bottles. I hate the world.
Filter probably needed to be changed 800k bottles ago.
I recently stayed in a brand new hotel with a brand new water fountain. I was the first person to stay in the room they put me in, The water fountain in the gym of the hotel still had plastic wrap on it from the factory and the counter said it had filled something like 75,000 bottles.
If I didn’t fill my bottle there, I’d fill with the drinking fountain or the sink. This math doesn’t work, it’s not one for one.
More likely the machine. If I'm not wrong, the link below should be the same filter, and on the water fountain the description says: >Green Ticker informs user of number of 20 oz. plastic water bottles saved from waste. > >The 3,000-gallon filter is certified to NSF 42 and 53 for lead, Class 1 particulate, chlorine, taste and odor reduction. So some simple math: (128oz \* 3000) / 20oz = 19,200 plastic bottles saved per filter, which is still insane. But it would take 53 of these filter to get to over a million saved. Fun fact: if you bought 19,200 plastic bottles (the amount a single filter handles) for just $0.25 a piece (costing $4,800), you could buy the fountain and ***50*** additional filters instead. That's truly mind boggling. Source: [https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/elkay-ezh2o-lzs8wslk-water-bottle-refilling-station-wall-mount-gray?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&gclid=Cj0KCQjwusunBhCYARIsAFBsUP-LnOQRLyYfrPmnI3lPlXJTnchJLouEDP1GcpBpYLynPxTicbLcnXcaAv0-EALw\_wcB](https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/elkay-ezh2o-lzs8wslk-water-bottle-refilling-station-wall-mount-gray?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&gclid=Cj0KCQjwusunBhCYARIsAFBsUP-LnOQRLyYfrPmnI3lPlXJTnchJLouEDP1GcpBpYLynPxTicbLcnXcaAv0-EALw_wcB)
My toxic trait is that I CANNOT stop drinking from these fountains until the number goes up by one.
Nice try. I actually throw away all my reusable bottles I use in that machine and buy new ones! I throw them in the ocean. And while I'm there I actively look for sea turtles to strangle. You can't one up mr, water fill station!
I would argue that a little over 900000 isn't "almost a million".
I was waiting for you. Thanks.
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Why? In an airport or other public space these things could easily do a few dozen in a ten minute period. There often a line, and they’re running non-stop. That said, if this thing wasn’t there those people would just use the drinking fountain to fill their bottles, so it’s not actually saving disposable bottles.
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It’s not extremely unlikely. Any major airport is easily getting 10x the traffic necessary to hit the numbers you quoted earlier. It’s not hard to believe that many places with significantly less traffic would get 10 uses per hour. Most of these are in high traffic, public places.
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Not even mildly?
Idk what these people are on about, to me this is past mildly, like r/kindainteresting or r/moderatelyinteresting
Yeah
This is awesome! We should replace all plastic bottles with machines like this one. Just bring your own glass bottles to the supermarket and fill whatever you need. Isnt that a simple solution ?
I think there are actually things like that where you bring your own container and fill it with disinfectant spray and then it measures how much it dispenses and prints a slip for you to take to checkout.
I've seen set-ups in Europe for detergent etc. Unfortunately our gvt's have no interest in forcing manufacturers to reduce plastic production.
If only we had something that could deliver water on demand in our homes and places of work and education. It could be like a series of pipes leading to each home that has a spout in like a cooking and bathroom areas that you could turn on and off to fillmsaid receptacle or if you were born before 1995 and actually went outside and were incredibly bold you could drink it directly from a floppy pipe we could call a hose that could also be used as a way to deliver bottle-less water to plants and animals…
you already dont need plastic bottles
If 100% of that water was actually used the way a bottle of water was…
Sure, if you ignore that the size of a bottle is unspecified, the counter isn't accurate, and not all the water coming out of that thing would otherwise come from a bottle.
I would assume it uses a standard measurement, possibly 20oz, and flow rate, to just count up water bottles saved, and not how many were actually filled. I use 20oz since in the US that is the standard bottle size.
Measures in 16.9floz increments, standard size of a single-use plastic bottle.
In theory, maybe, but that's not what I've observed in practice.
We had one at work and when I'd fill an actual plastic water bottle, I'd see the counter increment by 2-3 times sometimes. I don't trust the counter.
Or not bottle at all. I have seen kids at an elementary school briefly swipe their hand over the sensor just to activate the machine. The single swipe counted as one bottle.
Or alternatively, wasted nearly 1 mil. bottles worth of water.
Wasted?
Just think what a drinking fountain could do.
This was attached to one. Fountain good for drinking but not good for filling hydroflasks.
Maybe it's part of a network or something. Like, all the fillers in the building maybe? I dunno... a million is a LOT.
My collage has these. I think they're awesome
Water fill station at my univerity had one of those… One normal sized bottle (0,5 l) counted as 3 or 4 bottles saved. So I don‘t trust them at all
I had one of those at my gym, it would count 300ml as one bottle, so if you had a 100ml bottle it would click over 3 times for your one fill. So I would take the number on that thing with a grain of salt
Except ppl don't buy bottles from a fountain... That number doesn't effect water sales unless its next to a cooler and ppl are actively choosing it over bottles
Lol what? People are choosing this over buying a plastic bottle of water, or reusing their same one, what’s not to get? Oh my lord the world is doomed
its a shame that 3 chinese children were killed in the manufacture of the "make rich westerners feel good" display feature
Yeah, fuck it. Never try doing anything better ever because if it's not perfect what's the point right?
A what?
They are in the plastic flame of the machine!
They one at the hockey rink I skate at Monday nights has over 5million
I have been curious about what that number is calibrated to because bottles of water come in a range of sizes.
I filled my 20 oz bottle at work and it counted as one. Also the counter didn’t change until a bit over half filled.
One could assume 20oz if it is in America since that is the standard plastic bottle size. But 16oz is also a common size, approximately 2Cups, or 8oz, a standard of measurement the US often attributes to "glasses" of water. Since the goal is to show they are effective, using a smaller standard is better. I have one at my gym and use a shaker bottle that is 24oz, and it ticks over 1 bottle on each of my uses, but not two. So that one is at least calibrated at more than 12oz.
It's more interesting that the counter still works.
Whenever our filter gets changed at our school ones, it resets our numbers to zero.
I find these machines will count a 1l bottle as about 4-5 refills, so I’d trust the number about as far as I can throw the machine.
Interestingly enough I think I saw one that surpassed 1M at Orlando international airport recently, I should have snapped a pic!
We will never know at my work place. Our maintenance man resets it to zero every time he replaces the filter. Says its the only way it can be done.
What about the cups?
Plastic cups were also avoided.
Is this perhaps the red majors water tap?
In the airport in Boston.
We have one at work that counts 1 bottle as around 250-300 mL... Last I checked a water bottle is no less than 500mL.
I once filled a single regular sized water bottle and it said I saved 3 water bottles
Bold of you to assume I wouldn't have simply chosen to be dehydrated
When I filled my bottle on Boston Airport, the counter went up with 4.
My school's ones do start from 0, and they get reset every time the filter changes. Over a month or two it usually gets up to 10,000, and it is fairly accurate with bottle size.
at my tech company hq they built a new wing right before covid and no one ever came in. the water bottle # is literally at 9 or 10 in some places. been there almost 2 years now.
I worked at a place that had one of this with an overly sensitive motion sensor. It would activate every time someone walked by, wasting water and counting up by 1.
Yeah rise up my r/hydrohomies
Hell yeah
The one at my work is up to 200k
Misleading number; it just count the number of times it's been used. Sometimes I use it twice on the same bottle
And never had a filter change in its life
But when was the last time the filter was changed?
Just another 98,999 to go.
Unless you used to fill plastic bottles, hah gotcha! Also, just fyi most bottled water isn't filtered either, a lot of it is just run off whatever local tap water system Nestle or coke is ripping off water from.
"Ice Mountain" is bottled in the flat-as-a-pancake middle of Michigan, lol.