Project First Draft¶

Place your first draft below. Be sure and include your team number, nickname, and members.

This is due 11:59 pm Tuesday, Nov. 15th.

Team number: 3
Team nickname: Team Nickname
Team members: Kelly Kerins, Ryan McCalmont, Kevin Locke
Topic or title: Water bottle Filling Stations on Campus Kevin Locke Ryan McCalmont Kelly Kerins Team Nickname: Team Nickname ENSP 330 Final Project

Abstract: As time goes on, plastic water bottles become a larger problem each year. They are CO2 sinks and a waste of resources. We must consider alternatives to reduce our impact on the environment. For our project we wanted to know the approximate CO2 reduction from the water bottle filling stations on Sonoma State’s campus. Our goal was to decide whether the stations are actually having a noticeable decrease in CO2 emissions since their inception. In order to find this we went around to each filling station at SSU and collected the number of bottles filled from every station. We then compared this data to the carbon cost of producing a water bottle and the damage it creates throughout its lifetime. Our findings may not have produced a substantial amount from the SSU campus, but if every college campus incorporated our sample size of filling stations, the impact would be major. 6% of all of CO2 in the production of plastic bottles would be reduced.

Introduction: Each year about 22 billion plastic water bottles are thrown away. These bottles end up in landfills, incinerated, or in our ecosystems. In order to combat the waste that comes from plastic water bottles Sonoma State has put in water bottle filling stations that also show the number of each plastic water bottle that has been saved from going to a landfill. The make and model that is used is Elkay EZH2O Bottle Filling Station with Bi-Level ADA Cooler, Filtered 8 GPH Light Gray LMABFTL8WSLK. Each bottle also takes a certain amount of oil and water to produce. The total process of making a plastic water bottle to recycling it emits CO2. From getting the oil and water out of the ground to the actual making of the bottle Carbon Dioxide is put into our environment. For our project we wanted to look and see how much carbon is not being put into our environment from each water bottle filling station. We estimate that the stations won’t reduce CO2 by 80% but we can at least get a number and from there find out how many water bottles have to be “saved” by the stations to reach 80%.

Methods: We will start out by finding out how many of the water bottle filling stations are on campus. Once we establish this we will go to each one and look at the number on how many bottles have been saved. From there we can determine how much CO2 is takes to make and recycle each bottle and from there we can calculate how much CO2 is being reduced. We will look at other factors like estimating how much CO2 it took to put in the stations and how much CO2 the stations use. After looking at these numbers we can see what our total reduction in carbon emissions would look like.

Calculations: According to the Pacific Institute, there are around 50 billion water bottles produced in the US alone. Along with this info, around 170 million barrels of oil are used each year to produce the water bottles. If we divide these two amounts, we can find how many bottles are produced per one barrel of oil.

5e10 bottles made annually in the US1.7e7 barrels of oil used per year = 2941.18 bottles/barrel of oil

Once we recorded our data, we discovered that the 20 filling stations on Sonoma State’s campus that we sampled had filled an equivalent of 794,760 bottles with 12 ounces of water. Dividing this total by our number of sample stations gave us an average of 39,738 bottles from each station.

794,760 bottles from filling station20 filling stations sampled = 39,738 bottles filled/station

Once we calculated the amount of bottles filled from our stations, we divided this by our calculation of 2,941.18 bottles produced from one barrel of oil in order to gain a count of barrels that have been reduced.

39,738 bottles filled2,941.18 bottles/barrel of oil = 13.511 barrels of oil/filling station

According to the EPA, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per barrel of oil is calculated by multiplying heat content times the carbon coefficient. The constant they got is .43 metric tons of carbon dioxide per barrel of oil. Therefore when we multiply that by our 13.511 barrels of oil from one filling station, we find that it has reduced about 5.8 metric tons of CO2 per station. 13.511 barrels .43 metric tons of CO2/barrel = 5.80973 metric tons of CO2/filling station

With the constant provided above and knowing how many barrels of oil are used in plastic bottle production each year, a simple multiplication of the two will provide the amount of CO2 produced per year from plastic bottles

1.7e7 barrels of oil used per year .43 metric tons of CO2/barrel = 7,310,000 metric tons of CO2 per year from plastic bottle production

In order to get a reference point, we multiplied our “per station” total of 5.80973 metric tons of CO2 by 20 in order to find the total amount of CO2 that had been reduced.

5.80973 tons of CO2/station20 stations sampled =116.1946 tons of CO2 sampled

Once we got our total from our sample we wanted to see what kind of impact this had if the roughly 4,140 US universities had our sample of 20 filling stations integrated onto their campuses. Assuming our results were an average we managed to see an estimate of just over 481,000 metric tons of CO2 being reduced from just these college campuses.

116.1946 tons of CO2 4140 college campuses in the US = 481,045.6 tons of CO2 reduced per year by colleges

After that calculation we divided it by our total calculation of CO2 produced from annual plastic production in the US. This gave us a proportion of the impact it could have on a national scale.

481,045.6 tons of CO2 Reduced7.31e6 tons of CO2 Produced =6.58% reduction of total emissions from plastic bottle production

Conclusion: While these water filling stations are not a major driver of change in CO2 production, they are a step in the right direction. From our equations, if scaled up to all US colleges, and only using 20 filling stations, at the minimum it could reduce CO2 6%, of all CO2 produced from water bottle production. While this may seem like a miniscule amount of the CO2 production, ~481,000 tons of CO2 is a substantial amount considering this is only on college campuses and only 20 filling stations. With a campus that is double or triple the size of SSU, the CO2 reduction could be much greater. Along with the filling stations reducing CO2, you must also take into account other areas which the filling stations help reduce carbon and reduction of material use. It currently takes the amount of water from three water bottles to produce one. As well as the reduction in transportation costs/CO2 production. Although this reduction may not seem like a massive amount, we believe that it is a significant amount considering how simple of a change this is to incorporate.