Fondly or, depending who you ask, infamously referred to as “ZooMass Slamherst,” or “the Zoo,” the University of Massachusetts Amherst has a long-held reputation as a party school—but one with a mean green streak. UMass’s 23,000+ undergraduates compost more than 1,500 tons of food each year. The university offers a bike-share program, boasts more than 15,000 solar panels, and reduced its total greenhouse gas emissions by 27 percent from 2002 to 2016. Last year, it recycled 489 tons of single-stream products and 506 tons of cardboard. By 2050, UMass hopes to claim carbon neutrality.
For such a large university, this is an impressive record. But it’s marred by the scourge of an all-too-common source of campus pollution: its own, branded plastic water bottle. Handed out at orientation and sporting events, and sold all over UMass Amherst, discarded bottles are a familiar sight on the picturesque New England campus.
College of the Atlantic (COA), in Maine, severed ties with corporate beverage companies after students petitioned to purge a campus Coca-Cola vending machine, as well as an Odwalla (owned by Coke) cooler and a Nestlé juice machine. About a decade prior to that decision, students dragged a Coke vending machine out to Maine Route 3, then affixed a paper thumb to the machine to make it appear as if it were hitching a ride.