If you're someone who struggles to drink tap water and reaches for the bottle of sparkling instead, then you might want to consider a relocation to the City of Love.
This week, Paris City Hall has confirmed that they will be installing free sparkling water fountains (commonly referred to as 'fontaine pétillante') all over the city.
CityLab reports that Paris had installed a handful of the fizzy fountains since 2010, as an experiment to see how popular they would be.
Unsurprisingly, fontaine pétillante turned out to be extremely popular, so the small-scale project has now bloomed into a large, city-wide initiative. Soon, every arrondissement will soon have at least one sparkling water fountain.
In 2010, former Deputy Mayor of Paris and president of Eau de Paris, Anne le Strat, told 20 Minutes magazine that sparkling water had been requested several times by citizens.
"People often told me that they were ready to drink tap water if it was carbonated,” said le Strat. “Now they they’ve got no excuse not to.”
A writer from CityLab went and found one of the fontaine pétillante, and said that despite the fountain's unpleasant appearance (“tagged with graffiti and streaked with slime"), the water was "utterly delicious".
“I am not exaggerating when I say that this fountain’s water was, given the unprepossessing look, a magical surprise,” they wrote. “Cool but not icy, it’s extremely fizzy.”
The fountains act exactly the same as regular tap water fountains, and use water from the city's main water line. However, they also have a CO2 cabonator inside, that adds bubbles - similar to a Sodastream, or other similar products. The fontaine pétillante automatically adds the bubbles when the water hits 6.6°C (44°F) - which Condé Nast Traveller reports is to keep the flavour of the water fresh.
As well as encouraging locals and tourists alike to hydrate, the fontaine pétillante also act as a green initiative for the city. Parisians reportedly consume enormous amounts of bottled water per year, so the city is providing fresh, clean, delicious tap and sparkling water to citizens in an attempty to reduce plastic waste.
The ambitious initiative is reportedly already being rolled out, with a new fountain popping up recently at Square Eugene Varlin. Nine fountains are slated to be installed by the end of 2018.
