Community Education & Connections

Parent Education

Reusable Water Bottle Campaign

RELEVANT LINKS Bottled Water Facts Plastic Recycling Facts Bottled Water - Problems & Solutions

Reusable Water Bottle Campaign" to: In September 2008 the McCarthey campus eliminated all single serve disposable plastic water bottles from its Dining Hall. Parents now send reusable water bottles with their children to school. This change in Dining Hall operations has diverted 34,000 bottles annually (approximately 200 bottles daily) from the school’s waste stream.

Did you Know . . .

Meeting America’s demand for bottled water requires over 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
Eight out of 10 (22 billion) will end up in landfills.
A 1999, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) study concluded that bottled water is not necessarily any purer or any safer than city tap water.
Petroleum based plastic takes more than 700 years to biodegrade.
Less than 6% of our country’s plastic is recycled.

Teaching our students to reuse resources rather than rely on disposables is a great way for them to learn how individual actions can collectively make a significant difference.

Energy Conservation

While the Green Cup Challenge has helped us establish good habits for saving energy, it’s important for us to adopt those habits and continue them throughout the year so that their effectiveness is not lost. We can do this in our schools, our offices and at home, through simple measures like:

1. turning off lights

2. utilizing natural lighting in classrooms, offices, and homes

3. unplugging already charged Ipods, MP3s, cell phones

4. shutting down computers or utilizing a quick sleep mode

5. replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs)

6. recycling - aluminum, plastic, paper, ink cartridges

7. composting - food scraps

8. reducing waste - food, garbage, heat

9. reducing water use - shorten showers

10. walking instead of driving

Energy conservation does not need to be a cumbersome practice, and we all can make a difference even by implementing just one of these ideas.