For anyone trying to curb the earth's plastic water bottle addiction–equally of 2017, we were buying i million water bottles a minute, and by 2021, nosotros'll be using more than 580 billion a year–one challenge is still convenience. If it'south hard to observe a place to refill a reusable water bottle, people are unlikely to interruption the addiction of buying dispensable bottles at stores.

Since public drinking fountains tend to be rare, campaigns in a handful of cities are pushing restaurants to offer free refills of tap water. But a Swiss design student suggests cities could convert existing infrastructure instead, replacing traditional burn hydrants with a design that can continue to fight fires but double as a drinking fountain.

[Photo: courtesy Dimitri Nassisi]

"I liked the thought that people could have access to water everywhere, and so that they would perhaps take their bottle with them, and non buy a plastic canteen," says Dimitri Nassisi, a recent graduate of the École cantonale d'fine art de Lausanne (ÉCAL) in Renens, Switzerland, who designed the new fountain for his thesis project. On a walk with his domestic dog, as Nassisi thought about the problem of how to add more drinking fountains or bottle refill stations, he saw a burn down hydrant and realized that it might be possible to brand use of the fact that hydrants are ubiquitous.

[Photo: courtesy Dimitri Nassisi]

In Nassisi's proposal, a new cast fe blueprint would replace the summit of a burn down hydrant (the lower portion, hidden under the street, would stay the same). In the case of a fire, firefighters could still use it the same fashion they did earlier. But it includes a meridian with a push button that someone walking by can push to the correct to fill a reusable canteen, or to the left to drink directly. The overflow fills a dog bowl at the bottom.

[Photo: courtesy Dimitri Nassisi]

Inside, tubes pass through a pressure reducer, then you lot're not literally drinking from a fire hose. Nassisi explains that water pipes coming to buildings have the same high pressure, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel to reduce with a valve. The water in burn down hydrants in Switzerland is safe to drink; the same is true in many places, although some cities may utilize recycled h2o.

In Montreal, designers experimented with similar ideas–one design was an attachment to the top of a regular hydrant, but it was removed after it failed fire section tests. Cleveland installed temporary attachments on hydrants during the 2016 Republican convention. Simply Nassisi thought that information technology was of import to create a full replacement rather than trying to hack an old hydrant–both then it works well and so people would really want to use it. The design looks neither exactly like a drinking fountain or a fire hydrant; information technology's a new grade. "I wanted it to be recognizable and noticeable," he says.

Though the design is conceptual, Nassisi believes that it'southward practical–though he doesn't know what the total price would be. (In some locations, like the U.Due south., there might likewise exist challenges with lead.) While edifice a single drinking fountain is an expensive process, the new pattern would tap into the existing underground infrastructure for fire hydrants, cutting some costs. They could also pull from government funding both for drinking fountains and hydrants, and could be used when an former hydrant already needs replacement. "I don't think it would replace all fire hydrants," he says. "I think the smartest style would be to find strategic replacements in the streets."