It’s that time of year again! Dayton students are reunited on campus. All around you hear stories from your friends. Stories about what she did at the beach, his crazy experience in Germany and many other great summer adventures. Excitement, hugs and happiness are all around. This is no doubt the best and most exciting time of the school year.
For a certain group of seniors, the beginning of this year is particularly exciting. Fourteen senior River Stewards, myself included, got to launch our senior project – a campaign to promote drinking Dayton’s tap water and not use disposable-bottled water.
In order to encourage this, we designed a blue water bottle with the “Take Back The Tap” and “The Rivers Institute” logos. With a large donation from the city of Dayton, and the help of our community partners and The Fitz Center on campus, senior River Stewards were excited to present each of this year’s 2,200 freshman students with one of these free water bottles.
But we didn’t stop there. It’s important for students to drink tap water, but we also wanted to educate them on why. Here are a few of the facts that we stuck inside the bottles and will hopefully stick with you:
• City of Dayton tap water is tested every hour for purity, while bottled water is only tested once a week.
• Nearly 40 percent of all bottled water comes from the tap.
• The average person spends more than $400 a year on bottled water. That’s over 60 meals at the dining hall!
• Production for bottled water in the U.S. alone requires nearly 17.6 million barrels of oil. That would fuel more than a million vehicles in America every year.
Is that enough to convince you to be green in your water-drinking habits?
This is something that 14 River Stewards are passionate about, and we want to spread this passion to the entire university. There’s no better time than now, at the start of the school year, to start following a more environmentally responsible lifestyle. Let’s make this an even more exciting year than ever before.
For more information about River Stewards, please visit rivers.udayton.edu. Want to know more about Dayton’s water? Go to www.daytonwater.org.
