Bottle stations on the local nightly news and a story in the paper all in one day

Wow. When it rains, it really really pours...from our bottle-filling stations. Check out this piece on local WTAJ TV...

UNIVERSITY PARK, CENTRE COUNTY - Last year, Penn state installed its first water bottle filling station in the HUB Student Union, this year the school has added three more at Chambers Building, the Intramural Building, and Willard Building at University Park.

The university sells $2.7 million worth of bottled water each year, and is one of the first in the nation to offer this high tech thirst quenching technology.

“One of the most needless forms of waste that we have comes from non-reusable disposable plastic water bottles,” Peter Buckland, a PhD candidate at Penn State who helped spearhead the initiative to get the filling stations on campus, said.

...and then this piece in the Centre Daily Times.

“We are using this to investigate water bottle filling stations,” said Lydia Vandenbergh, program coordinator at the campus sustainability office. “We did some testing by the environmental health and safety group to make sure the stations would not be a breeding ground for bacteria.”

A club called 3e-coe, composed of education majors and self-proclaimed Earth lovers, had urged the Office of Sustainability to stop purchasing bottled water to sell on campus.

“The club was great. They were kind of the ones that came to university and said let’s ban water bottles,” said Vandenbergh. “The university spends about $2 million on water bottles in their contract with Pepsi. ... The club came to us with a black-and-white proposal, but we were able to work with them to find what’s the best for Penn State.”

Check out the comments on the CDT page too. Some of those are real keepers.

For the record, I think that Lydia Vandenberg and I should form a band about water. Name ideas?