McMaster’s ‘Bring Your Own Bottle’ initiative “aims to reduce the use of single use plastic water bottles by encouraging the McMaster community to use the water bottle filling stations located throughout campus.”
The initiative and the formation of a committee made up of students, faculty, and staff, was inspired by past SUSTAIN student research that identified a need to increase access to filtered water stations, especially for on-campus residence students, so that we could effectively move away from single-use water bottles.
The Bring Your Own Bottle Working Group is looking for SUSTAIN 3S03 students to help advance this work by analyzing Residence-Wide Student Survey results, measuring usage of refill stations, reporting on water bottle sales data, and recommending strategies to further promote water bottle refilling and reuse.
Each semester, Residence Life runs their ‘Residence-Wide Survey’, which asks dozens of questions of residence students, including questions related to single-use plastic bottles and water bottle refilling. SUSTAIN students have been involved in analyzing the results and making recommendations for improvement. While survey data is one source of information, we also have access to plastic-bottle sales from Hospitality Services and can collect data on ‘water bottles saved’ from refill station counters on campus. If you believe that ‘we can’t manage what we don’t measure’ and that ‘we need to make data-driven decisions’, then this project might be for you!
SUSTAIN 3S03 Students from Fall 2022 created a framework for this analysis and established benchmarks for future SUSTAIN 3S03 students to build upon. This data and framework will be made available to students who choose this project.
Community Project Champion:
Monica Palkowski, Living Learning Coordinator, Housing & Conference Services
Project Liaison:
Kate Whalen, Associate Director, Academic Sustainability Programs Office