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A Water Sustainability Application

Design Challenge

Propose, design and create an interactive prototype to solve a design problem related to environmental sustainability.

Design Problem

Water extraction and water wastage can cause groundwater shortages. New ways are required to decrease the water extraction and wastage to maintain water sustainability.

Research Points

The enormous numbers of people around the world buying water in disposable bottles rather than taking it straight from the tap is a trend that has substantial negative consequences for the environment. According to the statistics, 350 million plastic water bottles are used each day globally and at a decomposition rate of 700 years or so per bottle. It is estimated that around three liters of water are used for packaging one liter of bottled water. And that contributes significantly to depleting groundwater levels and decreasing the downstream water supply. Unfortunately, it's not too good for our environment.

Apart from nature, not only the unregulated impurities inside the bottled water may be the reason to worry, but also the dangers of chemicals such as metal may be leached from the plastic container over some time or in particular temperatures can produce dangerous results for humanity.

The revenue of The global bottled water industry is almost around $100 billion a year which goes into private infrastructure to create single-serve plastic bottles while an estimated three billion people do not have tap water in their homes. Buying bottled water is expensive whereas Filtered tap water is essentially the same product and costs a fraction of the price.

(Water Wastage)

The effects of wasting water are merely disastrous. Apart from the haphazard use of water, the PET bottles and leakage of water are responsible for the most significant wastage of water. So my application is designed to solve all these threats to environment and humankind problems by reducing the usage of single used plastic bottles as well as by reporting the leakage of water on time to take necessary actions to preserve water.

Design Solution

Various applications are available in the market to save water, but new ways are required to maintain water sustainability. People should be motivated to use the alternative of plastic bottles to drink water. Tap water stations are installed around us but still, every day 350 million plastic water bottles are bought. My design solution will help people to find nearest tap water stations easily so that they can drink water without spending their money which will eventually reduce the use of use and throw plastic water bottles.

Early sketch

The quality of tap water is also a question for many people, so in that case, people should have an option which can purify the tap water and motivate them to continue using it. There are different options of bottles which sterilize water using UV and removes 99% of all bacteria such as Steripen, Sawyer water bottle and many more. So my solution will provide a place from where the people can buy these bottles as their one-time investment and use it whenever they refill them with tap water.

My solution will also provide users to put a reminder to take a refilling water bottle with them when they want to go out. My design solution will give a feature to let the user use his camera from the phone, take a picture of any water leakage and send it to the water conservation center so that they can send the plumber or any specific person to amend the leakage.

People feel good when they get an appreciation for their efforts. So the application would allow users to earn reward points when they participate in reducing the water wastage. Using these reward points, they can buy refilling water bottles for themselves.

BANSARI SHAH