The Green Ticker is sure to please the environmentally conscious people who use it, as it gives them peace of mind that they are keeping plastic out of landfills. But they are not the target market. This is usually chosen by interior design companies and facility operators. I wanted to know their motivation behind choosing these machines over competitors' machines like Oasis. Is the Green Ticker (Elkay's trademarked term) contributing to sales?
When I told my husband, an architect for an interior design firm that works on luxury hotels, about my research, and learned that his team had selected Elkei bottle refilling stations for the gyms of hotels in the Middle East, I decided to use Elkei bottle refilling stations in my husband's office. I received an email from. she. I asked what the team thought about the green ticker. “Nothing,” he wrote back. “As long as it provides clean, drinkable water to fill your water bottle and can sense when to stop so you don't spill water and clutter your space, that's what we're all about.”
But wouldn't it be a different calculation for a more civic-minded building?The next day, by luck or coincidence, a high school friend of mine told me that her old job was the one where Brandon worked, albeit on a different campus. He said he was in charge of planning facilities for a 3 million square foot campus for the very same government agency. Excited, I asked her if she had any involvement in the selection of the Elkei filling machine, and she replied that the campus she was working on would never have a fountain that required so much maintenance. I said deaf.
As you know, these Elkay bottle filling stations require you to change the filters regularly. The filter is a selling point for school systems concerned about lead and other contaminants in drinking water. However, if you don't replace the filter, sediment can build up inside the filter, which can also slow your flow rate. If the flow rate is slow, the number of bottles saved will be inaccurate.
“Often they are calculated based on peak efficiency,” she explained. “Also, if you haven't changed your filter, you're in trouble. So if you find a water bottle refill station with a slow flow, you might want to think twice about using it.”
To continue my report, I returned to the yoga studio and took photo evidence of the two bottle refill stations on either side of the hallway. One said 66,906 bottles were saved. The other person answered 532,065.
I explained my quest to Rhys, my yoga teacher, and Radhika, another woman working at the counter. Rhys believed that the water station at the Brooklyn circus school had never been changed and was largely unusable. Encouraged by her energy, Radhika sprang into action and the studio opened. She shared with me the numbers of classroom capacity and average occupancy rate from 2016 till now. If each person who took the class filled a water bottle instead of purchasing a water bottle, approximately 709,000 total bottles would be saved. OK, the numbers you see on the Elkay machine are a possibility, I conceded.
but! Why is there such a big difference in the number of fountains? Is the area next to the women's changing room really nearly 10 times more usable than the men's changing room? The next time I went to the studio, I sneaked out in the hallway and secretly recorded the use of the two fountains. During the 30 minutes between classes, 19 students used the water fountain next to the women's restroom and 18 used the water fountain next to the men's restroom.
