Where Can I Refill a Water Bottle?
Where Can I Refill a Water Bottle?
If you are trying to cut down on plastic bottles and disposable drink containers, you may have wondered what is the easiest way to find someplace to refill your water bottle when you are out and about or traveling. There are actually a bunch of different apps that claim to make finding refill stations easy, so I decided to check a few of them out and see how easy or difficult it is to find places to refill a water bottle.
There are a bunch of different apps out there, but their popularity varies greatly based on the country. If you are not in the United States, check out Refill Ambassadors for a list of resources that might work better where you live.
After looking through all the apps available to my phone through Google Play Store and searching online, the apps that seemed to keep coming up were Tap, mymizu, Closca and Refill. I played around with each of them and they all had certain similarities. For instance, if you want to add a new refill station, they all require that you take a photo, and they all used a similar function to pinpoint new locations by having you drag a pin to drop the location on a map.
The mapping and searching functions seemed to work fine on all of them. I didn’t love the requirement to physically go to the location and take a picture, since the location I used for testing the ability to add new water stations was my local library. I don’t have to go there to know that they have a public water fountain, I’ve been there a million times. Anyway, that was a little annoying but I assume it helps them get fewer bogus submissions.
Now let’s discuss some of the differences in these apps. For reference, I am in Northeast Ohio, so I compared these apps to see how they would work in my area of the United States.
Tap
Tap (https://findtap.com/) is based in the United States, so they have a good presence here and I was able to find quite a few locations already listed near me that claim to accommodate bottle refills. I randomly checked a few other cities in Canada, France and the UK and they also seem to have a very large global network of refill stations listed worldwide at this point.
Technically Tap is not an app, it is a mobile-friendly website. Meaning you don’t need to download anything onto your phone, but you may want to bookmark the website or create a shortcut on your phone to have it easily available once you register. BTW, I got a response on my submission of the library location within a few hours, but it was rejected because I submitted a photo of the building rather than the water fountain (ugh, really?).
Pros:
The search tool is simple to use and offered up quite a few locations near me. It looks like it would be a helpful tool in pretty much any location I might want to travel to as well. Won’t take up any space on your phone since there is no app download required.
Cons:
Adding a new location was a little cumbersome. Too many required fields, one of which was a huge dropdown of categories that didn’t make a lot of sense. You MUST go to the actual location and take a photo of the water dispenser (not the building), which is inconvenient.
mymizu
The mymizu app (https://www.mymizu.co/home-en) is based in Japan and didn’t have a great rating in the Google Play Store (2.7 out of 5), but it had a lot of downloads and seemed to be gaining some popularity in the US so I decided to check it out.
This app seems to be as much focused on health and helping to track and remind you about your water intake as it is on reducing waste. They did have some water refill locations listed near me on the map/search tool, but fewer than I found on Tap. Pretty much all of the locations near me were public water fountains that said they were “sourced from public data.” So I don’t know how many people actually use this and submit locations.
Overall, I found the submission form for adding new locations a bit more user-friendly than Tap. But it’s been two days and my submission is still “pending review.”
Pros:
Easy to submit new locations. Helps you track your water consumption if you are interested in that.
Cons:
Fewer locations have been mapped in the US, and they are mostly just public water fountains. Seem like they are auto-generated and might not be totally accurate. They don’t seem to be very speedy when it comes to verifying new location submissions.
Closca
Closca (https://closca.com/pages/closca-water-app) is based in Spain, but it had over 10K downloads in the app store, so I decided to give it a shot.
I had a few problems right out of the gate. It offered to let me log in using my Facebook account, but then still asked me to enter my email and password and then said my password was incorrect, but I’m pretty positive it wasn’t. I logged in with my Google account instead.
As I searched around the map I noticed that all the locations listed seemed to have stock photos that had little or no relation to the actual locations. (Like a photo of a forest attached to a listing for a water fountain in a suburban office park???) The listings were also pretty vague, like no information about whether the water fountain was outside or inside a building and so on.
After a couple days, my submission of the local library as a water refill site was rejected because I didn’t take a photo of the actual fountain. Ugh.
Pros:
Submitting a new location was super easy.
Cons:
Seems to be some inaccurate information on this app, at least in my area, perhaps due to auto-generated locations rather than real user submissions?
Refill
Refill (https://www.refillapp.com/) is based in the UK and I really wanted to be able to use this one because not only do they help you find places to get water refills, but also coffee shops where you can bring your own mug, restaurants that will put your to-go order in your own container, and more.
This app had a similar issue with Facebook logins, maybe because I have more than one Facebook account? It was offered as an option but I couldn’t login with Facebook, I had to create a Refill account.
Unfortunately, Refill really hasn’t made a significant entry into the U.S. market. It’s available, but no one seems to be using it. I searched my location and only turned up one listed refill location. Also, If you want to submit a location they are strict – you need to verify that you have the permission of the owner and include a business email.
I liked the map interface and the easy-to-use buttons for selecting what type of refill you are looking for, however, I noticed that when I selected more than one category, say water bottle and coffee mugs, the water refill location disappeared. I had initially selected all categories, hoping to find anything near me and the map was blank so I thought there was nothing at all near me. I happened to deselect all options but water, THEN the water refill station suddenly showed up on the map. Not sure if that’s a glitch, but it didn’t seem intuitive.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to check on the status of a new submission, so I have no idea if my library submission was rejected or hasn’t been looked at yet.
Pros:
Nice map interface overall. Love the fact that they are including other refill types besides just water.
Cons:
Not useful in the U.S. unless many more people start to use it. Some glitchiness with the categories and searching. You also have to re-login every time you open the app, which is annoying.
Green and Grumpy Recommendation: Tap (for U.S. residents)
After trying out these various apps, I am going to stick with Tap for now. Even though submitting a new refill station is a bit of a pain, I think this is the only water-finding tool that’s going to be useful in my location. I would love to see Refill branch out more here in the states, but they might need to make the submission process a bit easier and enlist some locals to get the map filled out.
If you are not in the United States, I recommend you check out Refill Ambassadors for their recommendations of good water finding apps in each country.
Got any water finding and refill tips? Let me know!
