Single-use plastic water bottles have a lifespan of roughly 500 years, meaning that every ounce of plastic manufactured since the material was created still exists somewhere today.Single-use plastic water bottles have a lifespan of roughly 500 years, meaning that every ounce of plastic manufactured since the material was created still exists somewhere today.

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.

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