That'd be me. I traveled quite a bit all over the world and these seem to be a pretty American thing.
It's also a bit strange because for the countries that have them it is generally not recommended to drink tap water and for the few countries where tap water is considered safe to drink they are virtually non-existent.
Toilets in Europe will still seem to flush using the full power of Niagara Falls, which are quite rare in the US now.
National manufacturers have to design toilets for western states where conservation is a huge issue - might just be cheaper to sell those toilets nationwide than to have a different product line for wetter states.
It set a max volume for toilet flushes of 1.6 gallons and since it's a federal law, it covers everyone.
We replaced the old 3.5 gallons per flush toilet in our house with a new Kohler 1.28gpf unit and it flushes and clears the bowl just fine - no worse than the previous toilet with about 1/3rd the water use.
Just like how I run the dryer twice on "hyper-giga-dry" if I actually want dry clothes.
I expect plenty of parts of the US have loads of water and no droughts as well.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
Is there really an area that never faces water conservation measures?
Even normally wet Washington State is facing a drought due warm weather resulting in lower than normal snowpack, which is where much of the drinking water comes from.
https://m.kuow.org/stories/washington-state-drought-emergenc...
Usually the problem around here is sewage capacity - but perhaps it's a population density thing, and as long as you're below a certain density and it rains enough, nothing really is needed.
At least you can usually tell, if the ground is wet around it... that it's going to take your head off, if you put your mouth over it before turning the knob.
p.s. europeans just have fountains, and you drink the water out them with your shoe like it's champagne!
Why is this a problem? Flavor? This is certainly different than places like Mexico, where the tap water isn't potable.
> We don't need to talk about the things that you cannot taste or smell and what happened in Flint.
If we're talking about unknown unknowns, this is true of anywhere in the world.
San Francisco area also has surprisingly good tap water, likely due to the clay/soil in the areas the water is sourced from. In other places, like Florida, minerals and sulphur give the water a distinctly unpleasant taste, and shallow pipe depth keeps the water from getting cool.
Here is the link to a paper that compared contaminants in drinking water in various developed countries. When it comes to residual chlorine the USA demonstrated the highest levels followed by Singapore and Canada. After these three countries there was a huge gap before the UK and other countries which much lower levels.
Could it be that you are all so used to the chlorine, that you don't notice it anymore?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343719890_Comparati...
In addition, here is the WHO list of countries ranked by access to safe drinking water. The US is number 42 after Bulgaria and Guadeloupe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_access_...
Water fountains are somewhat normal in New Zealand and Australia.
In gyms/libraries/airports it always feels like refilling stations get 5x more use than drinking fountains, but when you're anywhere else, what are the odds you're carrying a bottle?
To be clear, I think fountains should do both direct drink and bottle fill-up.
I’m actually fine with tap water most of the time but I want to carry a bottle to sessions etc.
0.50€ for tap water in restaurant
No public drinking water facilities
https://overpass-turbo.eu , the sample query is already for drinking fountains. I navigated so Berlin is on the map and clicked Run, and it shows me all drinking water fountains on the map. A few of them even have image links, for example: https://imgur.com/d6UheOw
Someday I'll get arsed enough to figure out where the valve/plug is.
Don't even get me started on water fountains that require power.
See: <https://www.kqed.org/science/15191/california-communities-th...> and <https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article201568164.html>
Other regions without use-metered water include parts of the UK, and Asia where the concept is called "non-revenue water (NRW)":
UK: <https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/households/your-water-bill/unmetere...>
Asia: <https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jscejer/76/7/76_III_277...> (PDF).
Most forever-on fountains in the city are that way not because the water is abundant but rather as a means to reduce the amount of lead consumed by users.
Each spring all fountains run continuously for about a month to flush the system from winter stagnation.
The details of everyday items are fascinating.
I know nothing about fabrication or physical engineering, but surely it can't be that hard to make it simpler, like a safety pin or a <second thing>.
Not a joke. Thanks.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/EZ-FLO-Drinking-Fountain-Univers...
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/27/1d/b6/2f0ca95...
Also maybe less of an issue over here as you can generally just ask for a free glass of tap water in most places that serve drinks.
Good thing indeed, but then you go ie to France where you have sometimes such fountains too, and often reverse applies - don't drink unless its singed as drinkable.
What were they thinking?
Shared glasses were quite safe because every machine had special button to clean the glass with pressurized technical water (several calibrated jets) with some chlorine in it. People cleaned the glass with it before pouring soda water.
USSR has been eco/green paradise: no plastic bags or wraps. Meat was wrapped in paper. Milk, butter and sour cream were poured into whatever container buyer had provided. Glass bottles, paper and alike have been routinely recycled mostly by kids as there was small payment for bringing that stuff.
It’s only after the fall of the Soviet Union that shit with plastic poured into. As well with the fall of recycling, morals, etc. (say what you will about hollywood films of the 90s — nothing upstanding about it).
Soviet Union was green not because of morals, but because it was poor and couldn't afford single use packages. I remember when Nutella entered my country, the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive.
>And yes, most glasses have never been stolen.
I assume that's only because they were chained and in crowded places. Whole eastern Europe of that time was a thief paradise with casual theft almost completely normalized. (source: I am from Eastern Europe)
"The former Soviet Union was the world's second largest producer of harmful emissions. Total emissions in the USSR in 1988 were about 79% of the US total. Considering that the Soviet GNP was only some 54% of that of the USA, this means that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of GNP" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937...
These were both common in mid-century US too. These practices were slowly discontinued because other packaging was cheaper and more sanitary, especially as foods were packaged further away from the end consumer.
And when buying meat fresh at a butcher in the US, it's still fairly common to get it wrapped in paper.
As for glasses, at least in Lithuania those were stolen often. It was common for the machine to have only one glass.
But, of course, maybe it was different in other parts of the union.
Some paradise.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0959378094...
USSR was poor as fuck therefore is saved money on packaging whenever it could. It was occasionally ecologically benefitial as well, but to go from that to "eco/green paradise" is absurd.
USSR was polluting like crazy, significanly more than more developed economies. It treated its citizens as replacable cogs, to the point that after Chernobyl catastrophe it was Sweden not USSR that informed people there was, in fact, a catastrophe.
USSR was denying any problems with asbestos, calling it "asbestos hysteria" of the west. Russia is still doing it to some degree, and russian asbestos mines are causing significant health problems to the people living there. About 60 000 of them.
Soviet heavy industry was ignoring any health, safety and ecology concerns in the name of cost-saving. The reason most "commieblocks" are gray is the air pollution from all that industry and 19th century tech heating with unfiltered coal-fired powerplants.
USSR accidently destroyed Aral Sea. As in - it's no longer there. That's some amazing ecologic paradise.
The only reason Russia isn't the most polluted country in the world is that it's the biggest country in the world by area and very sparsely populated. There's a lot of it to devastate.
This type of arguments are still as annoying as the first time I've heard it. Reusable containers just don't satisfy modern day safety standards.
If they could get away without paying for packaging they will happily do so. They can't because chances of poisoning followed by lawsuits becomes real at scale, causes including not just accidental contamination but also terrorism.
I'm basing this on nothing, by the way, but it feels like a fun hypothesis.
Often the fountain will just drain into the dirt nearby, which means it is often the only green area when it's a desert fountain.
In the US, they seem to exist in offices and schools. Airports tend to have them, and often with a bottle filler on the side, which is great since we can't carry water through security.
But, just walking down the street, truly public water? Is that a thing anywhere in the US, or elsewhere?
More and more the newer ones are also "dog watering stations" which is basically a foot-operated drinking fountain with a slow-drain bowl (or just a concrete bowl with no drain).
Even parks that don't have restrooms will often have a fountain.
I'm struggling to think of any parks or high pedestrian areas around me that don't have a public fountain, nor in any of the cities I've lived in. Like, yeah, you're not going to have a fountain out in the middle of a parking lot. But they, to my recollection, seem to be everywhere that people tend to be walking a lot.
As for Europe, they also tend to be in a lot of high pedestrian areas, but really only in southern Europe (Italy, Spain, etc). In northern Europe it seems that everyone is just fine with being constantly dehydrated.
The park across the street doesn't have one. There are none in the town center (gotta buy Starbucks or similar).
And I don't recall seeing any public ones in downtown DC, other than the Mall and Smithsonian areas.
I already stated they do exist in quasi-public spaces (airports, offices, etc).
Like, if I'm running errands downtown, and I'm not in the tourist zone, there really isn't much without ducking into an office (that might be locked on the weekend).
The city of Amsterdam has 500 fountains or bottle filling stations[1]. The rest of the country has at least 2400 more[2].
[0]: https://www.wateratairports.com/topic/schiphol-airport-ams/ [1]: https://www.waternet.nl/service-en-contact/drinkwater/gratis... [2]: https://drinkwaterkaart.nl/waar-kan-ik-gratis-water-tappen/
