Wachusett Regional High School
Facts that Surprised Me from the Story of Bottled Water:
1. Fiji water was actually less clean than the Cleveland tap water.
2. Bottled water consistently fails in taste tests against tap water around the country.
3. Much “recycling” is actually downcycling, and made into products that will end up in landfills
later anyway.
TGAL has been working for the past 2 years to Take Back the Tap at our school.
Reclaiming this public water is the main initiative that we have been working to accomplish in
our club. We have 9 Aquafina water bottle vending machines on our school grounds. We also
have a canned soda vending machine, and a gatorade vending machine. The proceeds from
these vending machines goes to our football team. We also have a water fountain in almost
every hallway, as well as the cafeteria and in the front area of the school, near our auditorium.
Our goal is to get these vending machines out, and get water bottle filling stations in/
We have been lucky enough to have a wonderful leader come before us in TGAL. The
lovely and talented Anna hankins started this project, and now that she has graduated, and
moved on to UMass Amherst, Aibhlin, Jon, Anne and I are hoping to finish up the water bottle
initiative that was started last year.
Most of the members of TGAL took the Take back The Tap pledge at the beginning of
our water bottle project. Spearheaded by Anna, and our friend Jenny, we worked to collect all
the water bottles that we could, and put together a large art installation to raise awareness
about the volume of water bottles that we had collected. I have attached some pictures of
collecting the bottles, and of our art installation, as well as all of last year’s members standing
with the installation. Anna is on the far left, and Maddie, who is mwelsch17 from Skidmore in
this year’s PGC is on the far right!
Here is a picture of one of our posters at the installation!
Here is a picture of our club standing with the installation piece! (There are more bottles on the
adjacent wall, not pictured). Anna is second from the top, Maddie is 2 down from her in the
yellow sweater, and I am 2 down from Maddie, in the middle with the blue shirt.
Needless to say, we have a good head start on taking back the tap, and on this
challenge! You may have found Wachusett’s area of expertise.
Here is what we are doing this year to reach our goal of banning the sale of single use water
bottles at Wachusett:
1. We are working with the teacher who organizes our school store, and hoping to get reuseable
water bottles in the school store. We have a design, and at this point, we are only trying to
decide what company to purchase these bottles from. Originally, we hoped to get aluminum
water bottles, but there is a policy at school where all drinking vessels must be translucent or
transparent. This has caused a little bit of a road block for us in getting reusable water bottles
into the school store, but we are hoping to find a clear alternative and accomplish this goal.
2. We have the water bottles from last year, and we are working with the chapter of National Art
Honor Society at our school to come up with a better, even more powerful piece of art that will
raise awareness of our cause and help to make people realize just how many water bottles we
use here at wachusett, and what we can do to make a difference, and cut down our waste.
3. Anna did some amazing work, and won us a substantial amount of seed money from
Guerrilla Green. We are hoping to use this seed money to buy a reusable water bottle for every
student in the incoming freshman class to promote the use of reusable alternatives and tap
water.
4. The football teams get the vending machine money, which is one of the biggest hurdles we
have faced in eliminating the sale of water bottles at our school. We would like to work with the
football coaches and the athletic director to find a better alternative. I know that a lot of the
students at our school are not content with the snacks that are sold at Wachusett, so we all
believe that new snack vending machines with better snacks would be a reasonable alternative
to the Aquafina water bottles. We would like to formulate a plan, and discuss our sustainable
alternatives with all parties involved. Our goal is not to shortchange any of our teams, but to
make a difference and help keep our planet healthy.
5. Lastly, we are hoping to use the rest of the money from Guerilla green, as well as our senior
class gift money to install water bottle filling stations. We were originally going to use a model
that retrofitted onto our existing water fountains, but it turns out that they do not fit. We need to
find a plumber willing to give us an estimate on price, and how much work it would take to install
the alternative model, and we need to get approval from administration. We will be able to do so
once we have a quote, and we have found a plumber to do the work. It is possible that the
janitors would be able to do a bulk of the work, but it is to be decided how we will proceed with
the construction aspect of the filling stations.
We are hoping to revolutionize our school’s water consumption by the end of the school year,
and head to college knowing that we have reclaimed our tap water!