This university already has smart students, but it will soon boast smart water fountains, too.
Over the next year, Facilities Management will replace water fountains on the campus with environmentally friendly filling stations as part of the Sustainability Council’s Terps Love the Tap project. The new fountains will include a traditional water fountain head, a filtered filling station for reusable bottles and “green counters” that track how many plastic bottles have been saved over the course of the fountain’s use. The council can use the data collected to calculate greenhouse gas emissions and track progress as it looks to curb disposable water bottle consumption.
The idea for the project stemmed from a proposal by the Student Government Association’s student sustainability committee to drastically reduce bottled water consumption on the campus, said Matthew Popkin, who serves on the Sustainability Council’s filling station work group. The initiative to upgrade the fountains is the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year effort, said Popkin, who is also the SGA’s speaker of the legislature.
“My hope is that by installing the new infrastructure, we will reduce the consumption of bottled water and start a discussion about the consumption of bottled water in the future,” he said.
Similar fountains in Stamp Student Union have been successful, officials said, leading them to purchase more with a $71,482 grant from the University Sustainability Fund, a pool of money collected from student fees for green projects. At least 60 new units have been ordered, and officials plan to place them near the main entrances of high-traffic buildings, said Aynsley Toews, a sustainability office project manager.
The council hopes to educate students through Terps Love the Tap, Toews said. Each filling station will feature signs with facts about the environmental impacts of bottled water and the health benefits of staying hydrated.
The filling station work group — composed of students and university officials from Dining Services, the Department of Resident Life and other departments — is also planning a marketing campaign, complete with tabling at events, photographing high-profile students using reusable bottles and distributing maps of filling station locations.
Karina French, an undergraduate Sustainability Council representative, said the fountains’ added ease will encourage students to purchase reusable water bottles rather than disposable plastic ones. The education campaign is a key part of motivating students to avoid bottled water, she said.
“I feel very strongly that bottled water is an unsustainable product for social reasons, waste reasons, water access reasons,” French said. “Investment in the public water system is really the way to go.”
The most obvious problem with bottled water is plastic bottles can easily make their way into landfills instead of recycling bins — but that’s just the start, French said. The production of a plastic bottle requires more water than the bottle being made can actually hold, she said. And, French said, private bottling companies can act unjustly for profit, in some cases depriving local communities of their natural water resources.
“The idea of privatized water is unsustainable,” she said. “Water is an essential need in life that we should be investing in at a public level.”
And despite popular belief, municipal water is just as safe as bottled water, so Terps are free to love the tap. The filling stations only include filters for the purpose of taste, French said.
“I think that it will help start a conversation and allow us to point to positive and attractive alternatives to students when we ask them to stop using bottled water,” she said. “I see it as a stepping stone.”
