London Zoo Is Bottling It

Introducing our brand new outdoor vandal proof sports bottle filler.

Did you know that in the UK we use approximately 38.5 million plastic bottles per day?

Think about it for a minute.

That’s 275,000 tonnes of waste plastic every year, and with most families failing to recycle an average of 40kg of plastic annually that’s a whole lot of rubbish littering our beautiful planet. And you know the really scary fact? Most plastics take 500 years to decompose, so your bottle of Evian today could be to future generations what one of Henry VIII’s goblets is to us… Only, you know, less rare, shiny, valuable and historically important.

Plastic has long been one of the world’s greatest pollutants. It’s undeniably useful, but we use far too much of it. At London Zoo we do our best to encourage recycling, but with more than 1.2 million visitors every year we still find an awful lot of unnecessary waste, so we wondered what else we could do to help stem the flow of plastic.

Our solution?

Drum roll, please…

The Halsey Taylor Endura II 4400 pedestal bottle filling station! 

So what’s that when it’s at home? In short, taking away the bells and whistles, it’s an outdoor tap… OK, so it’s perhaps not the most exciting exhibit you’ll see at the zoo, but it is free to use, vandal-proof (that’s not a challenge, by the way, just in case you were tempted), rust-free, designed specifically to accommodate sports bottles, and guaranteed to deliver clean, fresh, reviving water on demand.

Available at numerous locations throughout the zoo including the Pengin Park, the bottle filling stations are there to help reduce the need for all those plastic bottles, while also helping our visitors and staff to save a few pennies. A family of five visiting the park for the day could save upwards of £10 on drinks by bringing a bottle and using the stations. Kids may not thank us, but we’re hoping that parents will.

Calorie-free, sugar-free, additive-free; water is the healthiest drink you can get. It doesn’t rot your teeth. It doesn’t make you put on weight. It doesn’t trigger diabetes or heart disease or any of the other health ‘epidemics’ we regularly read about. It’s good for the skin and it boosts the memory by keeping you fully hydrated – just ask the elephants in our partner park over in Whipsnade; they get through  a staggering 200 litres of water a day, and never forget a thing!

Bottle filling stations aren’t as much of a rare site these days as once they were with all the great work from the likes of #OneLess who are helping to raise awareness of the problems caused by single use plastic bottles. As more and more organisations are switching on to their social responsibility you could soon see these once-endangered specimens roaming the parks of every major town and city – that’s conservation in action for you! For the meantime however, you can catch your first glimpse at ZSL London Zoo.