The Water Consciousness Bag raises awareness of water shortages in Northwest China.

One neighborhood in Lima, Peru has found an ingenious solution to their water shortage.

Tappening is an educational campaign from BPA-free refillable flasks. It is designed to encourage the public to drink tap water whenever possible and also aims to send a message to the bottled water industry about its “unnecessary and extreme waste of fossil fuels and resultant pollution of the Earth”. We found their rather fun fly-posters on the wall of a deserted building site on 22nd & 3rd Avenue in New York.

The AquaIris is a portable water purifier from industrial designer Talia Radford that wraps an intelligently low-tech system into a neat package.  Every water molecule that passes through the non-electric system is directly hit with the sun’s rays modulated to a UVC frequency able to purify water.
The purifier is intended for regions near the tropics and can be worn around the neck like a lanyard.  It comes with a removable re-usable filter that houses the converter crystals that do all the purification work.  Only 2% of the world’s water is drinkable and the issue of finding uncontaminated water in [...]

Two different types of fictive projects based around bottled water have hit the market recently. With “daily nutritional values” ranging from -200,000% Carbon Tetrachloride to 2% polar bear tears and 98% melted ice caps, they are both part of campaigns to raise awareness over toxic spills, lying advertising and to end our massive consumption of bottled water.
Marking the 25th anniversary of the 1984 chemical spill caused by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, the Yes Men, Bhopal Medical Appeal and London creative design firm Kennedy Monk have developed elegant bottles of water called B’eau pal.
The group explains:
“The unique qualities of our [...]

Combining popular mobile technologies and grassroots on-the-ground efforts, the TapIt Water program connects empty-canteen-carrying water seekers with cafes and restaurants who offer good, clean, NYC tap water at no charge.
Cafes sign up to be TapIt Partners, supplying their location and how they plan to make water accessible. Users can then log onto the site, or access its search and mapping features via an iPhone or Smartphone application, to see where along their routes they can duck in for a refill. It’s a winning solution for everyone – fewer plastic bottles in landfills, cold (or room temperature, in some cases) water for the [...]

Ecofriend points us to an interesting invention that recaptures wasted heat energy from a shower’s waste water. The EcoDrain will grab heated water before it goes down the drain and uses it’s heat to help wram incoming shower water. The Ecodrain’s creators believe that it could potentially save millions of dollars a year in energy costs.
[via Ecofriend]

Amidst the debate over the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry (is it really a debate anymore?), rises another complication in our consumer relationship to water: sure, you’re bringing your own Kleen Kanteen, but how much water was used to make that? Or the jeans you’re wearing, never mind the burger you had for lunch? The Wall-Street Journal recently reported “it takes roughly 20 gallons of water to make a pint of beer, as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda, and about 500 gallons, including water used to grow, dye and process the cotton, [...]

Hario Glass’s Iuosen Pot is not your average water pitcher: equipped with a metal cage filled with iouseki stones and binchotan charcoal, the pot infuses typical H20 with a fresh, springwater taste and odor. The stones are what account for the distinctive, natural mineral flavor, while the charcoal absorbs solutes like chlorine and metals, while softening the water. And as Boingboing found, the special ‘iouseki’ stones have some sort of (unconfirmed) medicinal properties:
…Iouseki is famous as a medical stone and the two stones elute minerals, are porous and provided with strong adsorption force and ion exchange function and provided with [...]

At the start of this year, we featured a prediction by Monocle Magazine’s Tyler Brule that we’ll see brands consider whether to use local materials, production and craftsmanship as a competitive positioning against other brands that get their stuff made in factories in Asia. Brule said:
In 2008, provenance is going to become more important at luxury goods companies as CEOs decide whether to downgrade their brands (they wouldn’t call it this, but we would) by shutting workshops and moving the work to Asia to improve margins, or take a long-term view and keep investing in craftsmanship, education and maintaining manufacturing [...]

As the debate continues over Water Bottles we have seen the discussion become more of a mainstream topic of conversation. We’ve aggregated enough opinions from the anti-water-bottle brigade, but what’s the reaction from the people who make bottled water? We asked Adam Gayner of water brand Fred was kind enough to shed some light on the industry from his perspective.
Do you feel there are benefits to consuming bottled water?
From my standpoint with Fred, onset child diabetes and obesity and many other health risks are reduced greatly by drinking bottled water [most people are dehydrated even with the growth of [...]