A new scan-and-vend system could mean cleaner water, fewer plastic bottles.
With summer finally here, I know it’s extremely important to protect my children from getting dehydrated. Children are more vulnerable to dehydration than adults because of their lighter body weights and higher turnover of water and electrolytes. Children also overheat quicker because they have a lower sweating capacity than adults.
Knowing this, I keep their stainless steel bottles full of filtered water and remind them to drink frequently. When we’re away from home and I fill their bottles either from a tap, a water fountain or with bottled water, I worry about the quality of the water. So, when I read an article about a company with an invention called the Solar Clean Water Street Vending Dispenser (SVD), I was really interested.
The SVD is basically a vending machine that dispenses clean water into your container. The plan is to sell stainless steel bottles or glass drinking water flasks and a card. The bottle/flask will have a unique barcode that matches the barcode on the card. The card will be used to purchase your water at the dispenser instead of using cash.
According to Dave Ashman, trustee and creator of the H2O Trust, a global clean drinking water project, the aim is to provide guaranteed high-quality, safe, clean drinking water. Also important: providing people a way to get clean water without them having to purchase one-use disposable plastic bottles.
Additionally, with the global environmental effects of climate change, they see the wasteful global transportation costs and oil used in the manufacturing of plastic water bottles being reduced by their SVD sidewalk-located water system.
They’ve designed the dispenser to be powered by solar panels; it dehumidifies the moisture from the surrounding atmosphere and converts it into drinking water free of contaminates such as chlorine and E. coli.
Ashman hopes to have SVDs in place in and around London in time for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
This sounds like a fabulous idea. One that will revolutionize the way we think about water when we’re away from our taps.
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