Item — HN Reader

Removing bottled water is not a financial decision, but an environmental one. Every new employee is given a water bottle they can fill with water an infinite number of times.

If they took away bottled water, I'm sure they replaced them with fruit juice, organic teas and all sorts of ambrosia.

2 comments

I should have noted that the bottled water 'discussion' at Google was long and heated and what Googler's would call a multi-centa-thread [1]. There were folks who shared the position stated above that it was environmentally 'better' to not have bottled water in the mini-kitchens. And there were folks of a more empiricist frame of mind who analyzed data and came to an alternative conclusions. Understand the company is very data driven.

Watching it unfold was educational on so many levels.

[1] A 'Centa-thread' being an email discussion that gets to 100 replies where Gmail would fork it and start new conversation.

Interesting, since I've never got to a 100 reply email I've not seen this.

So, they replaced the plastic bottle of water with a plastic bottle of flavored water-like beverage. Sounds like an environmental win to me.

They replaced bottled water with a water dispenser that dispenses ambient, cold, and sparkling water. Many engineers still choose to drink ordinary water even with all the flavored options.