Getting Rid of a Plastic Habit

Sophisticated cities in North America and Europe are banning plastic bottles to cut down on waste. But what happens when water bottles are gone from the supermarket shelves and your reusable bottle runs dry while you are out and about? A young Israeli company has a plan to offer water refilling stations in cities everywhere.

Woosh Water Systems, founded in 2010, is developing a system where you’ll swipe a chip, put in your bottle, and within a minute get a clean, cold refill. It is a high-tech replacement for public water fountains that most people are loath to use, says CEO Itay Tayas Zamir.

 “It’s our aim to give people the option to refill their own bottle and not to buy more plastic bottles when they are out on the street,” Tayas Zamir says. “Every plastic bottle you save, you help the environment in the sense of reducing the carbon footprint.”

A disinfection system cleans your bottle and the system itself, every time it’s used, with the help of a non-polluting ozone purification technology. The ozone is taken right from the water, meaning no waste or chemicals are going down the drain.

The system can be tailored to filter out any number of contaminants. Every Woosh system can also be customized to reduce heavy metals and pharmaceuticals from the local water source.

 Tayas Zamir says the question of charging a fee will be up to the individual municipalities that adopt the system. The cost is borne either by users or by the city; municipalities could recover the expense of the machine and maintenance through advertising.

Many European cities have public fountains and yet people continue buying bottled water. “This is who we are targeting—people who don’t use the fountains,” Tayas Zamir says.