Battling water-bottle pollution

George Bovino was surprised at the number of water bottles his students purchased each week in the North Salem High School cafeteria ”“ a rough estimate of 1,500.
And “that doesn”™t take into account the bottles brought in from home and the faculty and staff,” said the deputy head of the school.

For a 755-person institution, the number was substantial, and the need great, for a place to subsequently dispose of the excess plastic.

North Salem High School has just launched a bottled water recycling program in partnership with Nestlé Waters and Norwegian global recycling company TOMRA.

“Students consume more water than any other drink while at school, especially at this time of year,” said Michael Liess, president and CEO of Shelton, Conn.,-based Tomra of North America, in a statement. “We are delighted to provide the receptacles to allow students to responsibly dispose of their used water bottles.”

The “Project WET” water education program goes beyond providing the 12 indoor and several outdoor recycling stations and trains students about sustainable water resources and the different stages of recycling.

Brainstorming “began about a year or two ago when we started thinking about sustainability,” Bovino said. “We were paying attention to paper recycling, but we weren”™t paying attention to water.”

Bovino said that there is visible campus support for the program.

“There is a clear interest in using the recycling stations and a decrease in the number of bottles we”™re seeing on tables and in classrooms,” he said.

According to the International Bottled Water Association, which represents a majority of U.S. bottlers, at the start of the decade, Americans drank more than 15 billion gallons of carbonated soft drinks; they consumed only 4.5 billion gallons of bottled water.

By 2008, carbonated soft drink volume dropped to 14.1 billion gallons and bottled water almost doubled to 8.7 billion gallons.