Half A Teaspoon + ShowerWatch

A few months ago, I read about a water bottle with a built in filter mechanism, called 321 Water. I had a look at the website, and found the product was developed by a company called Half A Teaspoon. A viewing of the Half A Teaspoon website led to 2 observations.

1. Product Development

Besides 321 Water, Half A Teaspoon also produces a product called ShowerWatch, which the company describes as a "4-minute shower timer which creates awareness of time in the shower and stimulates conscious use of water" (btw is there a way to paste special into Blogger, so that I can paste text into my blog post and have it take on the same format as the text in the post, rather than the format of the text in the site it is from?). This got me thinking of that old joke about the US vs the Russian astronaut, whereby the US astronaut spends years funding research to develop a pen and ink that can write in space, while the Russian astronaut just uses a pencil. In this case, while Half A Teaspoon states that their products are based on Eco Design principles, the device is ultimately electronic, i.e. it has some sort of LED panel, and it will use batteries.

So - why not just use an hourglass?

2. For Profit?

I'm still not sure my thoughts on this point are very coherent, but thought I would pen them down anyway.

When I viewed it a few months ago, the Half A Teaspoon site described the company's philosophy as (I'm paraphrasing here) something along the lines of turning enough profit to continue their activities, i.e. the development of eco friendly products. After viewing the site again today (I wanted to quote the exact language) it appears the philosophy has since been amended and this description is no longer there.

This got me thinking about whether I - and indeed society - have expectations that green businesses should be not-for-profit. Or at least minimal profit. Sure, certain large scale industries like electric cars and wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers are definitely for profit, but I have a hunch (and maybe this isn't true) that when it comes to smaller scale initiatives, people may expect these projects to be driven by desire to help rather than desire to turn a profit.