Zimbabwean home owners now have the added convenience of being able to fill up with purified drinking water when visiting selected fuel station forecourts in Harare.

Flo2Go's purified water pumps are situated next to the fuel dispensers and deliver purified water by five-stage reverse osmosis filtration. The pumps are equipped with retractable hoses that dispense drinking water at the rate of 20 litres every 60 seconds. This means motorists are able to place water containers in their vehicles and have them conveniently filled for just 15 cents a litre with little effort.

According to Angelique Salter, Sales Manager of Flo2Go, the first roll-out of the company's purified water pumps went off without a hitch at Puma Lewisam Service Station and Zuva Pendennis Station in the capital, with another 6 outlets to be installed over the next few months. "Zimbabweans love the fact that the water pump is a homegrown solution to the challenge of finding high quality drinking water that is also affordable in large quantities," she said.

While the uniquely Zimbabwean water pump is locally-designed, Flo2Go worked with South Africa-based Ozone Services Industries (OSI) to perfect the unit's technical attributes. "After successfully refining the concept with OSI, we're now ready to roll-out the water pump further afield within the SADC region," said Ms Salter. OSI has been supplying the bottled water and wine industries across Southern Africa for the last 20 years. Ozone here is the preferred method for rinsing bottles before filling for disinfection. This is because ozonised water leaves no harmful taint, residue or by-products and is far quicker and stronger than chemical-based products. OSI has also supplied ozone-related expertise and equipment to remove chlorine from municipal water for the prepared water sector. Even municipal water treatment plants in South Africa are increasingly using ozone for disinfection and iron and manganese removal.

Ozone is a naturally-occurring disinfectant well-suited for water treatment; approved as far back as 1999 as a disinfectant for Food Preparation by the American Food & Drug Administration and that country's Environmental Protection Agency. Ozone's strength is that it reverts back to oxygen rapidly after it has disinfected water.

Ozone is 2.5 times stronger than chlorine and works 3 000 times faster because it kills bacteria on contact. Chlorine's only real advantage, and it's one that appeals to pool owners, is that it ensures protection long after it is added to water. In drinking water the consumer doesn’t want to taste the residual chlorine which gives the long term protection.

OSI's reverse-osmosis water treatment devices use sand, birm and carbon to filter supplied water. This is followed by a process where the water is oxygenated and purified by a proprietary reverse-osmosis process that includes the re-introduction of beneficial minerals back to the water. Ozone has been used for decades as a well-documented safe and natural purification process for water and more recently in over 300 US municipal water treatment plants.