Green Mountain College to ban the sale of water bottles

POULTNEY – This August, Green Mountain College will ban the sale of bottled water on its Poultney campus. Like many campus sustainability initiatives, the ban comes largely as a result of a student-led project.

Andrea (Dre) Roebuck ’14 consulted with the College’s sustainability coordinator Aaron Witham about the most effective way to go about banning the sale of bottled water. Roebuck’s concerns were economic (bottled water is more expensive than tap water) and environmental (only about 14 percent of plastic bottles make it into the recycling bin, and producing plastic bottles takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, according to the Earth Policy Institute).

According to Witham, Roebuck and other students were also concerned about the commoditization of water, which is becoming an ever more precious resource. “The more we buy and sell bottled water, the more we are engaging in a culture of treating water as a commodity, incentivizing businesses to extract it from the ground in one community and sell it to another community, with often little benefit to the people or ecosystem in the community from which the water was extracted,” he said.

Roebuck met with campus stakeholders such as Chartwells, the College’s food service provider, other outside vendors and the College administration and held events to raise student awareness about the negative impacts of bottled water. One event included a taste test featuring bottled water and tap water.

“We tried to see if students could tell the difference between tap water, filtered water or bottled water. We saw no discernable preference—in fact tap water was rated slightly higher. It seemed the best option was to encourage people to fill up at filtered water stations that are all over campus,” Roebuck said.

Finally, she garnered 163 signatures from students, staff, and faculty in support of the ban. Over 25 percent of the residential student body signed the document.

Under Roebuck’s leadership, Chartwells agreed to stop selling bottled water in the dining hall. PepsiCo, which has an existing beverage contract with GMC, agreed to remove bottled water from all of its soda vending machines on campus and replace the product with healthier alternatives to regular soda.