Going Green in More Ways Than One: Carrying a Reusable Bottle Filling Station

An average adult needs to drink approximately 48 ounces of water per day. So they need a bottle filling station to maintain hydration for optimal health and wellness.

If you drink eight glasses of tap water a day, it would cost you about 49 cents a year. However, if you got your hydration exclusively from bottled water, you’d pay about $1,400, or 2,900 times more. 

And of course there are the obvious environmental implications. The United States is the world’s leading consumer of bottled water. All with Americans drinking 26 billion liters from some 2.7 million tons of plastic bottles.  And sure, you could recycle all that plastic, but according to the Container Recycling Institute, more than 80 percent of those bottles end up in a landfill.  That’s a lot of waste. It also takes about 17 million barrels of oil annually to create those bottles, according to the Earth Policy Institute.  That’s enough oil to fuel more than 1 million cars for a year.  That’s a lot of oil.

So, whether your sustainability motivations for carrying a reusable bottle are financial or environmental. Because it makes a lot of sense to use your own bottle. The question is where to fill it when you’re on the go?

Thanks to the latest in water fountain innovation – bottle filling stations. Because it’s never been easier to carry a reusable bottle to meet those daily hydration needs.  You may have seen them at the airport or your health club.

Sure, you could fill your bottle at a drinking fountain, but they weren’t designed for that purpose, so it can be challenging to fill your bottle all the way.  A bottle filling station can replace a traditional fountain or be added to an existing fountain, and it dispenses water three times faster.

Elkay® has been manufacturing products here in the USA since 1920, and it recently launched new models of its ezH2O® bottle filling station that offers additional energy savings. The stations have a programmable setting to turn off the refrigeration portion for the unit when the facility is not in use, allowing buildings to cut the energy usage of the bottle filling station dramatically.  Electronic sensors on a bottle filling station also offer touchless sanitary operations with an automatic 20-second shut-off timer, ensuring that water is not wasted.

With one filter in the bottle filling station, you can dispense the equivalent of 20,000 disposable bottles.  The station’s messaging system identifies how many 20 oz. water bottles are saved by its usage.

One success story includes an early bottle station adopter:  New Mexico State University.  The University now has 34 ezH20 bottle filling stations. It also estimates these bottle filling stations have saved more than 520,000 bottles. Finally, which equals more than 21,600 pounds of 16.9 ounce bottles over a three-year period.

And it all starts with a bottle…

Courtesy of Elkay