For those who haven’t followed along from the very beginning, this web log is ultimately, in the short term at least, about producing a design solution to be entered into the James Dyson Award competition. For the past two weeks I’ve been deliberating and deciding on what problem I believe is worth solving, and what my plan of action will be for the next sixty days of the competition. This will be a short discussion about the former of the two; I hope to broach the latter in a follow-up tomorrow.
-SM
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Bottled Water.
I certainly cringe at the phrase, at it’s subtle oxymoronic tendencies, just as canned heat, or “fresh-squeezed orange juice from concentrate” has done before it. The fact is, though, bottled water has solved a lot of problems. It’s allowed disaster relief efforts to bring safe and clean water to afflicted areas. It’s made it possible for city folk like myself to drink water that actually tastes good. And it’s brought convenience to drinking, storing, and transporting water with such completeness that it’s hard to imagine a time in the future where water won’t exist locked up in its plastic prison.
But this entrapment of life’s most essential of necessities has brought with it its own slew of problems. Once drained of fluid, the clear carcass of these vessels becomes utter un-biodegradable; centuries will pass before the transparent sheen of these bottles erode into the wind, and it may take longer still for the compounds themselves to return to their prior, unaltered state. Even recycled, the amount of energy required to reshape, re-pour, and remold a plastic bottle is an astronomical cost. Transportation costs are staggering as well; trucks loaded with the most abundant of molecules on the earth are no lightweights, and the exhaust they create further pollutes are sky and ultimately makes the clean water we so desperately crave even more scarce. Even worse, our massive export of water to and from countries that are either scarce or abundant in the resource may forever be changing the landscape of our water supplies – after all, Fiji only has so much water to give before it’s turned into Tatooine. Complete with seedy space-bars, I hope.
So how do we solve bottled water? There’s been a huge resurgence in the last few years that has attempted to tackle the problem in a variety of ways. Brita and others have made it incredibly simple to have clean, tasty drinking water right from the tap. An outpouring of new aluminum, eco-friendly bottles have made transportation of water reusable, environmental, and incredibly simple. Sadly though, this hasn’t alleviated the fundamental axis on which bottled water is so universally enjoyed – convenience. For all the ease of use that the Brita filter and the aluminum bottle bring, they still don’t compare to the pre-filtered, pre-bottled ease that plastic packaging offers.
In the end, bottled water is an impossible problem. Because we can’t compete with convenience, because we can’t fight against the fundamentals of human nature.
But though solving bottled water presents itself as impossible, this doesn’t mean that we can’t solve the problems that bottled water creates. Is it solvable to make the Cretaceous-casings that our bottled water are currently bound in not so harmful to our environment? Absolutely; and currently great work is being done in the production of biodegradable plastics. Unfortunately, with little more than a “my First Chemistry Set” at my disposal, I’ll leave the petro-chemical tinkering to those with the proper equipment. And what of alleviating the strain that transporting these billions of gallons in planes, trains, and automobiles? Again great work is being done in that area, but it is certainly beyond the scope of one man and one summer to replace internal combustion, or improve aerodynamics of vehicles, or whatever other efficiency boost is currently planned.
So what does that leave us? A very fundamental, poignant question to a serious problem:
“How do we localize water usage to individual regions, communities, and, ultimately, households?”
This is the question we must ask ourselves. And this is what I’d like to leave you with, until tomorrow, when I do my best to lay out precisely how we can solve this problem.
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