Correction appended
Across Penn State's campus, five "hydration stations" are now up and running for students to fill up their bottles with toxin-free, cost-free and plastic-free water.
The Office of Physical Plant (OPP) has finished installing filling stations in Chambers, Willard and Thomas buildings, as well as Rec Hall and the HUB-Robeson Center. On Wednesday, the station in the Chambers Building displayed electronically that it had saved 15,000 disposable bottles from being used.
The clean water initiative started in the fall of 2008, when numerous eco-conscious Penn State students lobbied the university's administration to cut waste from water consumption.
"It's basically the result of a lot of hard work of a bunch of organizations here," said Ben Tutolo, president of Eco-Action, a club dedicated to promoting environmental awareness and sustainability on campus.
Eco-Action joined forces with 3E-COE, another on-campus environmental group, and OPP to bring the hydration stations to campus. There are multiple reasons to stop using bottled water, OPP spokesman Paul Ruskin said. Bottled water is not guaranteed to be good drinking water, unlike the water from the hydration stations. In addition, plastic water bottles are expensive and contribute to waste. Plastic bottles even drain fossil fuels because of how heavy they are to ship. The university is not planning on banning bottled water, but Ruskin said OPP wants to make another option available.
"Bottled water is convenient, but it's unnecessary," Ruskin said. "In the long term, bottled water is not a good thing."
Students can use the hydration stations as much as they please to receive clean water free of charge. There are two models of the stations, one produced by Elkay and one by Oasis. The Elkay model is attached to a regular water fountain from which students can drink instead of having to fill up a bottle.
"That's real convenience," said Peter Buckland, president of 3E-COE. "By having real convenience, we get rid of unnecessary waste."
Buckland (graduate-educational theory and policy) hopes this idea will spread to different parts of the university. Students in dorms, library staff members and even someone from Penn State Berks contacted him about getting more hydration stations, he said. But despite the positive reaction, Buckland and Tutolo (senior-environmental systems engineering) say they think change will come slowly.
This article incorrectly identified the number of plastic bottles saved by a hydration station in the Chambers Building. The hydration station had saved 1,608 bottles by Thursday morning.
