Blaine High School students are saving water bottles everyday. The students have been using new water bottle filling stations that have been put in over the past year which was paid for by the Blaine Booster Club. Elkay is the company who had developed the filling station. The company had created a hands-free fountain which allows you to set down a bottle under a cold stream of water; filling it up in about 5-10 seconds. The machine also provides the amount of bottles saved by measuring how much water was used and displaying the number on a small screen.

When I asked Blaine student Elisabeth King what she likes about the new fountains she said “I love watching the number go up”. I then asked her if she uses the fountain and she responded with “Yes I do, I use it everyday before lunch to fill up my water bottle”. I asked another Blaine student, Michaela Martin, If she also uses the new fountains and she said “Yes, I use it a lot for sports”. Again, I asked another student, Collin Rodmyre, what he thinks of them and he said “They are really handy”. Students have a positive outlook on this new addition and use them for a variety of things like after school sports, lunch, or just during the day. After installing these fountains Blaine High School has saved approximately 55,000 water bottles.

The environmental impact that this can have is  tremendous. When we talked to Mr. Phelps, Blaine High School Principal, he explained to us the environmental impact that plastic has on our environment. This school with others, we can reduce the amount of plastic water bottles in landfills. According to Huffington Post, 80% of water bottles end up in landfills, and what makes plastic so dangerous is that it takes about 450 years for it to decompose. This means that the more water bottles we use the more it will pile-up in landfills. Limiting the amount of plastic we use can greatly reduce the harmful effects that plastic has on the environment and our health.