Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink

I’ve been doing crowd-sourcing research for my 9-5, and I ran across this. I’m passionate about the whole bottled water challenge. I understand the issues; I’ve seen Tapped; I carry my Sigg bottles almost everywhere. On the flip side, I think it’s good and healthy for people to drink water, and bottled water is a modern convenience that seems potentially vital in this age of sugary sodas and obesity.

I keep thinking back to “the good ol’ days” when people didn’t buy water or carry it around with them like pack mules. What did they do? They drank from water fountains. Just try to find a public water fountain these days--It’s challenging. Peter Gleick (aka this week's lab crush) and Google to the rescue! The WeTap project uses crowd-sourcing to map public drinking fountains. 

They are looking for volunteers to help with the project in the SF Bay Area and in LA. All you need is an Android-based smart phone and a gmail account. Oh, and a willingness to seek out, test, and post public drinking fountains. If you’re not on the volunteer side, you can still check out the resulting map. The program is in Beta now. I'm not crazy about the current interface, but I'm sure it will get slicker as the project evolves.


SF Gate via Treehugger. Photo by flickr user TPapi (CC license).

Cool drink of water

These already made the blog rounds, but Aquaovo's water filters are too stunning not to show here. Expensive, but oh-so-pretty. 

If your family is ready to stop buying flats of bottled water from Costco, this is a stylish green upgrade and will quickly pay for itself. If (like us), you drink Oakland water straight from the tap, you'll need to treat it more like an art piece.

Images from Aquaovo. Thanks to The Kitchn for the tip.

Finger pointing: Down the drain

Architecture blog 3rings highlights this modern yet low-tech sink design by Maja Ganszyniec

Inspired by traditional pre-plumbing sinks, the designer located the drain outside the basin. "To get rid of the grey water we have to tip the water out. By doing so we become more conscious of how much water we are using and mainly throwing away".
I'm not sure how practical it is, especially with in the house, but it's a lovely implementation of a thought-provoking concept.

Image from . Thanks to Re-Nest for the tip.