Lilah’s Story

When I was nine, I travelled overseas with my family, and in a town in Poland, I saw a large bank of drinking fountains in the main square. Tired joggers were drinking from the taps and thirsty dogs were lapping up the leftover water from the troughs at the bottom. I watched the scene for awhile, and noticed something very interesting. People were filling up large plastic bottles to store water in from the fountains. I found this fascinating because those bottles, which had been intended for single use, had been used again and saved from landfill.

I have always been extremely passionate about the environment and when I saw this, I realised it could be a solution to keep plastic bottles out of our oceans. Kiwis throw out an estimated 828 million single use plastic bottles each year, often ending up on beaches and in the ocean. Drinking fountains are vital for reducing that number. They are also very important for our communities’ health. Families are often forced to buy sugary drinks, because it’s cheaper than water. On average, New Zealanders consume 5-6x the recommended sugar intake, and soft drinks make up a quarter of that. However, despite the obvious importance of drinking fountains, New Zealand doesn’t have nearly enough. New Zealand has only one drinking fountain for every 3,303 people and as few as one fountain for every 17,000 people in the worst-affected area.

I wanted to change this, so I founded the Public Water Project to campaign to get more drinking fountains installed around New Zealand. The Public Water Foundation was created in 2020 and I began talking to corporate sponsors to raise funds for drinking fountains. Then COVID hit, and the economic environment changed dramatically. I realised I would need to do things differently. I launched a limited edition kid’s face mask with Meo Air with a share of the profits going to the Foundation. But I also wanted to create a revenue stream to fund fountains that did not depend on other companies’ generosity. In 2021, I launched Water Us, a social enterprise that sells toilet paper direct to consumers, with 50% of the profits being donated to The Public Water Foundation. – Lilah McDonald