Sodastream

When I lived in my apartment in Ghent, I bought cans of pop for myself as I don't like drinking a lot of water. I like to alternate some tastes but I didn't drink enough to open a big bottle of pop: by the time I'd finish the bottle, all the CO2 would have escaped already.  But after a visit of Jan, a whole pile of cans was gone each time in one evening.  Jan has the amazing capacity to sit down after dinner in the sofa and start drinking...one glass , two glasses, .... an entire 6 pack of cans or a full bottle.

So since we live together, we consume a lot of bottles. We are in a constant need of buying multipacks of water, sparkling water, lemonades and coke and our plastic recycling bag fills up quite quickly. We were especially constantly running out of sparkling water, that Jan uses to quench his thirst.

So we started to wonder whether the Sodastream system would be something from us. I remember having seen the system for the first time on a market in Ghent more than a decade ago and I judged it something for people that wanted an alternative against the big evil brands of the big corporations that are out there to steal our soul. It seemed like a bizar system for hippies that wanted to drink obscure self-made drinks. Yep, I'm pretty good in judging and labeling if I want to be.

But recently you see the Sodastream systems in all supermarkets and we wondered if it didn't make sense after all. A FB enquiry among our friends gave a clear opinion: do not try all the fake lemonade tastes etc  but if you consider it as a sparkling water machine then it works actually quite nice. There were quite a lot of our friends with the system already.  So we bought a promotional machine and gave it a try.

After 2 months, I must say we are very fond of it. Our plastic waste has gone down with over 50%, our drinks shopping list as well and I notice I start to drink a lot more sparkling water now over bottled mineral water, lemonades and coke...because it's so easy and always available on the table. We are still learning how long we can go with 1 CO2 cilinder and how easy the refill process is from those cilinders.  But so far we're quite enthusiastic. On the other hand, we do not feel tempted whatsoever to add flavoured syrups to the water to make our own lemonades...there I faithfully stick to my popular brands.

The Sodastream principle is simple: you fill one of the Sodastream bottles, which are thicker to support the CO2 pressure with tap water, you connect it to the machine which holds a CO2 cilinder and give a few pushes to inject the CO2 into the bottle and ....your water turned into sparkling water. Quite a good concept: it makes the logistics of drinks at home so much easier, hopefully the CO2 cilinder production process is ecologically enough to make the entire system more ecological than the regular bottle industry and after  x time you've saved back your initial investment of the system and then it also becomes a cheaper way of drinking.

Note: this is not a sponsored post