rinse n'go - hand hygiene on the go

Topic

According to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report by 2030 1.9 billion people will lack basic hand hygiene facilities. The combination of water scarcity and lack of sanitary facilities got us thinking of maintaining hand hygiene when outdoors or homeless. That is the reason why we developed the rinse n’ go.

Why

When spending a prolonged period outdoors most either stop washing their hands, or wait until they reach the next body of water or public toilet. Also common is using a water bottle between the legs to pour over or a canister (According to our field and market research). Alternatively, you always have the option to use hand sanitizer. However, this often leaves the hands feeling sticky. Waiting or not washing your hands can be impractical when preparing to eat, menstrual hygiene or after having to go to the bathroom. When using a canister/outdoor shower or water bottle, more water is lost in attempting to recreate a cleaning situation similar to that in a sink. Bringing more water to adapt for this means carrying extra weight which is impractical. In creating the rinse n’ go we did user testing to determine a commonly used water amount. In our tests, 250-500 ml were necessary for clean hands, which is a lot if we consider a water bottle size of 1-2 litres. Whether we regard a homeless person or a hiker, water is something precious that cannot simply be refilled at ease and shouldn’t take up much weight. The Rinse n’ go reduces this amount to 70-100 ml.

How

To adapt to both water scarcity and difficulties during usage our water bottle has one side to drink and one which allows you to spray water. Allowing you to waste less water without having to forgo the feeling and hygiene of clean hands. In addition, we aimed to provide a solution for the soap being used in the process of cleaning. Liquid soap isn’t as environmentally friendly as hard soap, but hard soap is hard to travel with as it gets wet and needs to dry thoroughly to prevent the spread of germs. That is why we added a soap grinder in the bottom of our bottle with which the soap can be ground to soap flakes. By making the pump button usable with your arm we prevent contamination by contact with the hand surface. At the same time, this solution adapts for multiple users without having to touch the same smeary wet soap. Moreover, hard soap or caster soap is reasonably cheap, non-toxic to the outdoors and accessible, which is important for our homeless users.

Who

The rinse n’ go is developed for hikers, bikers, travelling in a car or anyone with an active outdoor life, further away from water supply and bathroom facilities. We want to use the rinse n’ go in a buy-one-give-one business model which allows us to help homeless people in need. Distribution of the bottles can be from soup kitchens or homeless shelters.

Materials and parts

To create a bottle which is easy to clean and use we are using a stainless steel body with bioplastic parts for the grinder and spray parts.