To support student journalism and the content you love, become a member of The Daily Orange today.

When Syracuse University senior Ben Cavarra was living in a dorm, he noticed students would often grab a water bottle from the vending machines rather than use a water bottle filling station.

SA’s Community and Government Affairs committee is now looking to increase the number of water bottle filling stations across campus. The measure is part of an increased focus on sustainability that also includes proposals to let students take out more to-go containers from SU’s dining halls, said Cavarra, SA’s vice president of CGA.

“The idea is … to encourage more reusable container usage and the idea is making it more convenient through increasing the number of water bottle filling stations, students are more likely to use reusable water bottles than go buy the Aquafina water bottles SU sells,” SU Student Association’s Director of Sustainability Harrison Vogt said.

Currently, SU residence halls each only have one water bottle filling station, all of which are on the first floor, Cavarra said. Now, he wants to have one station for every three floors.

SA has found two main roadblocks: funding and maintenance. To implement Cavarra’s idea, SU would have to spend money to install new water lines which would run to each station. The university would also have to ensure that the filter for each is working and solve electrical problems, he said.

To encourage students to use reusable water bottles, SU is promoting an app called “Fill It Forward”. The app can be accessed via a QR code and shows students how much waste they are saving with each refill. Vogt expects the codes to be available soon.

According to SU’s website, the program already has over 1,000 members and has diverted 30.63 pounds of waste as of Sunday.

Megan Thompson | Digital Design Director

“I really believe that a lot of sustainability initiatives really need to stress the idea that there needs to be a cultural change for us to be sustainable as a society,” Vogt said.

Outside of the filling stations, Cavarra said he wants to increase the amount of to-go boxes students can take out. After the university stopped using plastic to-go boxes during the pandemic, SU brought back the “one green box policy,” he said.

In campus dining halls, students can only check out one to-go box at a time. If a student loses their container, the university will charge them $3 to receive another, according to SU’s policy.

Only having the ability to take one box at a time has led some students to complain about the system, Vogt said.

To address these student complaints, SA’s Sustainability Committee collaborated with SU Food Services. During meetings between SA’s Sustainability Committee and SU Food Services, the group discussed allowing students to take out two boxes at a time. But members of Food Services said they did not have enough room in their budget to increase the amount of boxes for each student, Cavarra said.

Dining halls do not have enough boxes already and SU would have to purchase more to upgrade to two boxes, Cavarra said.

Additionally, the software system that tracks to-go box checkout is set up so that each student only gets one, meaning the software would need to be adjusted for students to have access to two boxes, he said.

With both the water bottle filling stations and the proposed change for to-go boxes, SA hopes to expand the amount of sustainability initiatives at SU.

SA President David Bruen said becoming plastic free and carbon neutral by 2030 are two of SA’s goals. The SA Sustainability Committee is working to achieve these goals by working closely with the university and students, Bruen said.

Vogt said that this session of SA could have the largest impact on sustainability in the association’s history.

“It might be the most momentous Student Association year we’ve had,” he said.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, SA’s goal for carbon neutrality was misstated. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on October 16, 2022 at 11:30 pm

Contact Kaitlin: kcampb14@syr.edu