I have never seen a faucet fail to flow or a toilet fail to flush at Columbia Law School. Our facilities staff are great, and modern plumbing has generally figured out how to release pressurized water at a user’s convenience. But there’s one exception: the limp stream dribbling out of Elkay ezH2O bottle refilling stations, creating lines and sowing agita.
To add insult to injury, the fountains give drinkers two dishonest bits of reading material while they wait for their water. To the right, the fountain boasts that it has saved the planet from some improbable number of disposable plastic bottles. To the left, a “filter status” indicator proudly beams green in spite of apparent issues.[1]
As far as I can tell, there is no villain here. Elkay executives did not huddle together and scheme, “let’s over-engineer water fountains and market them with lies.”[2] But two things are clear: (1) There’s no way the fountain outside JG 104 has helped eliminate waste from 501,567 disposable plastic bottles, and (2) Elkay’s fountains are delicate enough to require more maintenance than Columbia wants to pay for. These bottle refilling stations are dishonest and defective.
It’s a classic Columbia Law arrangement: weirdly janky for a prestigious school, fantastic fodder for complaining, and ultimately not that big of a deal. Making peace with the ethical and mechanical brokenness of these fountains is a step toward feeling charmed and not scammed by the rough edges of our institution.
Ethical Brokenness: The Context-Free Big Number
Let’s start with that little green ticker announcing the fountain across from JG 104’s Stakhanovite environmentalism.
Setting aside the accuracy of “half a million plastic bottles saved,” this claim commits the cardinal sin of science communication: the context-free big number. Consider, for example, Google Flights telling me I can avoid emitting as much CO2 as 2,800 trees absorb in a day by flying Delta. Is that a lot? A little? How many tree-days until we stop climate change? You could replace “2,800” with “28,000” and the big number would continue to mean nothing to me. This is the core problem with context-free big numbers: fake precision.
Who knows how many plastic bottles have been saved by that particular fountain? And even on the generous assumption that every time someone fills up a water bottle, they’re doing so in lieu of buying a disposable plastic bottle, what would it mean to have saved half a million plastic bottles from landfills? How many more plastic bottles saved until we’re not drinking microplastics?
Google Flights and Elkay aren’t engaged in science communication; they’re engaged in marketing. But their marketing raises questions about the environment to which we have actual answers. (We really need to invent something better than jet fuel and/or fly less,[3] but even if everyone who flew saved 2,800 tree-days, the effect on emissions would be negligible. Plastic waste isn’t actually that big of a deal when we keep it out of water, and developed countries’ waste management systems are pretty good at keeping plastic out of water.[4]) Big, soothing, context-free numbers distract not only from solving environmental issues, but also from the tough work of sorting out real issues from non-issues.
There may be a case that the plastic bottle ticker is a noble lie rather than an ethical lapse. The guy who led the ezH2O project agrees the plastic bottle count was a “dumb idea” but he was happy to see it did make the fountains go viral. Elkay fountains now appear first when one googles “water fountain,” and they probably have contributed to some large number of disposable plastic bottles not being wasted. More importantly though, the ticker doesn’t really matter. It’s misleading and distracting but easily-ignored.
Mechanical Brokenness: No Respect for Users
Beyond the questionable marketing, the fountains disempower drinkers, and this can be harder to ignore.[5]
Fountains break constantly and mysteriously. Users are helpless—there’s no sense of why it’s not working, nothing you can smack or fiddle with to get the water running. Google says the problem is usually a clogged filter, but as mentioned, the filter indicator can’t be trusted, and nobody is unclogging filters on their way to class.
Even when not broken, the ezH2O bottle refiller is a paternalistic tyrant, refusing to cede control to users. Once it feels you’ve had enough (somewhere around sixteen ounces), the fountain stops refilling. It demands the user pull away the water bottle and perform some Dickensian “please sir, I want some more” groveling before getting more water. Sometimes water dribbles out, sometimes water shoots out at a lively pace, sometimes it waxes and wanes—with no physical lever, users are at the mercy of the sensor.
More nitpicks. The fountains don’t do well with narrow-mouth Nalgenes; they’re the only fountains I’ve ever seen that need didactic little graphics explaining how to activate a sensor instead of working intuitively; despite there being a second, smaller fountain next to the main refilling station, I’ve almost never seen two people using a single station at once. The water pressure gets so low in these situations one would need to swallow the fountain to catch the water.
The fountain’s malfunctions and autocratic fussiness stem from a complicated design. There’s tons of plumbing and gadgetry inside the ezH2O bottle refiller. But while this complexity makes the bottle refillers faulty and inflexible, it also allows for nice features when the fountains do work: The water is cold, clean, and touchlessly accessible. While I would trade these nice features for more reliable fountains, these are design trade-offs rather than a fundamental brokenness.
Ideally the school would either find a way to maintain these fountains or replace them with more rugged alternatives. But again, the water fountains are not the lynchpin of one’s legal education.
Dealing With Brokenness
Our school has bigger problems than water fountains. Traditional complaints include: ballooning tuition, Dodge Gym, professional incentives swallowing pedagogy, outdated facilities, and unresponsive administrators.
Some of these problems are like the plastic bottle ticker—they really don’t matter and we should ignore them. Most of these problems are like the fountains’ constant breakdowns. They’re short-term inconveniences that sort of matter, and we should advocate for what makes sense but not care too much. There are no answers for the real problems, the ones that stick around for years, but happily they’re rare.
I started writing this column in a fit of righteous anger, but it seems to have evolved into sheepish whininess. It has some hokey advertising and engineering compromises but the Elkay ezH2O bottle refilling station is not fundamentally broken. It is, like all of us, flawed and intermittently useful.
Daniel Bugingo is a 2L at CLS.
[1] The Elkay website suggests filter issues are usually the culprit when water levels run low.
[2] The people who made this seem well-intentioned.
[3] See Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet 66–114 (2024) (addressing climate change).
[4] See id. at 223–54 (ocean plastics).
[5] The following criticisms come from the Nielsen-Norman usability heuristics.