Refiller – The Smart Drinks Dispenser

The outcome of our challenge is simple, to eliminate plastic waste from RTD beverages that are supplied in offices. The Refilled team set out to provide not just an “alternative” to single-use plastic bottles in the office, but a complete drinks solution that is simply “better”. A better guilt-free experience for the end consumer, a better outcome for the team supplying the drinks, better outcomes for the building and office managers, and a much better outcome for planet earth. To achieve as much impact as possible the team also set out to deliver all of this at a lower cost.

The Refiller is a smart drinks dispenser that empowers businesses and end users to both reduce their carbon footprint and help eliminate plastic waste. Instead of shipping pallets of drinks around the country which are then needed to be stocked on the shelves, the Refiller is a standalone unit that is plumbed into the water supply at each office. The Refiller is touch screen operated, where the user can choose between still or sparkling water and a variety of flavours and boosters that they can mix and match which is then poured into the user’s own bottle.

The beverage industry is the largest contributor to plastic waste at XX billion tonnes per year. Currently, billions of drinks (that are made up predominantly of water) are transported extremely long distances before they end up in a person’s hands, where they are consumed and the packaging discarded. Because of this, every drink poured through a Refiller is effectively a bottle that has been saved from being discarded. At the same time, the embedded carbon footprint of the drink is drastically reduced as the drinks are mixed on site, using the existing water supply and highly concentrated syrups.