I am currently underway with a project and have a meeting scheduled with the sustainability director on campus, in an effort to drastically lower our plastic water bottle usage, by replacing the option of getting a plastic water with meals at the dining facilities, it would be much easier, less costly, and far more sustainable to use large refillable water dispensers, and have them available for people with refilllable water bottles, along with reusable water bottles made without plastics or harmful material at an affordable price, much like the Ose token reusable meal container program we already have in place. In preparation for my meeting I’ve thought of the biggest reasons plastic water bottles are used on campus, through observation surveying and analysing my own habits I’ve gathered that the biggest barriers to using refillable filtered water is that there is only one water fountain located in our union where most dining facilities are on campus, and it’s obscured far away from where people are eating and choosing their meals. The cost efficiency as well, as it comes free along with the option of a fountain drink cup with one of our meal plan swipes. most of the time I get a fountain cup and fill it with water from the machine, and reasoned most other people would do this too if it was an issue to them, until I ran into the functional difficulty of carrying a paper cup of water to class. I think corporate deals like our school has wirh Pepsi make it economically advantageous to buy their products in bulk, hence why we have hundreds of pallets of bottled water sitting in the back rooms of our dining facilities. As well as the obvious harm to the environment this corporate sponsorship causes, the health risks associated with the newly researched microplastics suggests that consuming water out of a plastic bottle at least once a day can lead to the buildup of these microplastics. Cutting our purchasing of plastic water bottles to only be available at campus conscience stores and special exceptions would radically reduce our plastic waste stream, as well as our carbon footprint, needing less delivery trucks to restock plastic water bottle pallets. Sorry for the wordy entry
