Water Box - An Alternative to Bottled Water

Launched in 2019 in the wake of the Flint crisis, the Water Box was developed by a group of innovators brought together by 501CTHREE in Ann Arbor, MI. Its first partner was Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, whose members were looking for solutions to provide free water in Flint after the state of Michigan ended its free water distribution program. Since then, Water Boxes have been deployed to places as diverse as Los Angeles, California; Jackson, Mississippi; Lame Deer, Montana, as well as Newark, New Jersey through the Newark Water Coalition (NWC).

The purpose of the Water Box is to help communities with unsafe water by giving them an alternative to distributing single-use bottled water. The Water Box is a mobile, four-stage treatment system that has been designed the water safety of communities where the municipal water infrastructure has been degraded or contaminated.

Because it is intended to be used by community members, the Water Box is simple to operate and maintain. Built from readily available off-the-shelf components, the 3-stage filtration and UV treatments remove the most common mineral and biological contaminants in municipal water such as lead, arsenic, copper, E-coli, Legionella, and many others.

Because a level of distrust still exists among some Newark citizens, the Newark Water Coalition continues to distribute free water through four Water Box systems. In addition to distributing gallons of clean water to Newark’s communities of color, the Coalition has replaced more than 500,000 single-use plastic bottles with reusable water jugs.

As part of its continuing effort to empower its citizens, the Newark Water Coalition continues to lend lead-testing kits such as this one so that citizens can test for lead levels in paint, soil, and dust, in addition to water. The results are also added to NWC’s data collection.