Maybe it’s my advancing age, or the fact that I spend a lot of time carrying an increasingly heavy (yet adorable) child, but the strain of lugging cases of San Pellegrino home from the market was beginning to test my love of sparkling water. And the energy it took me to haul it the last mile home got me thinking about all the energy it must have taken to transport my fizzy water halfway around the world, not to mention to manufacture and recycle all of those bottles.
Fortunately for the ecosystem (and my back), there is a better way. It’s called the Sodastream, and it’s a counter-top device that makes very convincing sparkling water by injecting CO2 into tap or filtered water from your home. It’s streamlined, requires no power source, and it’s even relatively attractive (although I think there’s a little room for improvement here — they should call somebody like Yves Behar or Jasper Morrison for a little design help, in my humble opinion). It’s also quick and easy (if a little noisy) to use and, unlike the old-fashioned soda bottles with those little bullet-shaped cartridges, it holds a large CO2 cylinder that lasts for months of pretty heavy use. The company claims that it makes carbonated water for $0.25 a liter, but to tell you the truth, I haven’t kept close enough track of our usage to verify this. It’s certainly much cheaper than buying bottled seltzer.
The basic set-up (which includes the injector, two reusable water bottles and one CO2 cylinder is about $90. Additional cylinders come in two sizes and are about $25 or $35 to purchase (filled) or about $15 and $25 to exchange empty for a full replacement, although there are various package deals that reduce this cost a bit. Detailed product and pricing information and online purchasing are available at www.sodastreamusa.com. The site also has a very good interactive tool to help you find stores near you that sell the gear and exchange the cylinders, saving you the cost (and the planet the emissions) of shipping them to and fro.
