As much as I love exhibiting at the San Francisco Green Festival and educating people on how to green their personal care routine, after four consecutive years, I guess I was feeling a little burnt out. So last year and this year I opted instead to go to the Festival and just enjoy it from the perspective of a green consumer eager to learn about new products and services that are making a difference.
While I enjoy shopping for sustainable clothing, gifts, food, and home accessories, my main focus is on products I can use that have an impact on my efforts to live a sustainable lifestyle. This year I found two products that captured my attention and both have to do with water!
The first product is AirQua – Pure Atmospheric Water. This is a water filtration unit (or system as they call it) that pulls moisture from the air, runs it through a bunch of different filters and converts it into drinking water. Wow! What a concept! Talk about a new alternative to bottled water … What I love about this product is that it doesn’t require or use any tap water, but rather it “taps” the water that’s already in the air you breathe. For those of us who live in relatively humid climates, this unit can make up to 2 gallons of drinking water a day. And like standard commercial water filtration units, you can use it to make cold or hot water. Another plus is its Energy Star rated, which means the energy it uses to do it’s thing doesn’t cancel out the benefit.
At approximately $2,500, this is not an inexpensive product. The filters run about $200 and need to be changed once a year. It struck me as the perfect unit for an office or commercial space wanting to be greener with its water consumption.
The second product is SodaStream. This is a table-top unit (or several different styles of units) that allows you to use regular tap or filtered water to create your own carbonated water. It’s like the 21st century version of a soda king, but instead of using a lot of small whippets (which creates a lot of waste), it uses one large whippet that can make between 60 to 180 liters of soda water (that’s somewhere between 15 and 45 gallons of the stuff!) depending on how fizzy you like your water.
Basically you fill one of the two re-usable carbonating bottles that come with it, place the bottle in the unit and start manually pumping the water with the button at the top. Once it makes a loud beeping noise then you’ve achieved the first level of carbonation (which the owners describe as the equivalent of Pelligrino). If you want it fizzier than that, you hit the pump one more time which takes it to level 2 (Perrier) or hit it one last time to get to level 3 (club soda). I tried both Level 1 and Level 3 and found them both very effervescent.
As someone who drinks carbonated water fairly often, I was tempted to get this unit as I pondered how much energy would be saved from making and recycling the plastic bottles I currently consume by, not to mention the potential toxins leaching out of the plastic during and after their useful life. At a price tag of between approximately $120 and $180 I decided to wait and see if I could get one on sale at one of the retail outlets he mentioned which includes Williams Sonoma and Macys –or possibly somewhere online.
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