Like the trees lining Professor Street or the Rathskeller’s tavernous dine-in option, plastic water bottles have been felled by Oberlin’s administrative axe. Once the king of DeCafé’s gleaming fridges and in dining halls throughout campus, the reign of bottled water has been brought to an end by Oberlin’s Office of Energy and Sustainability, which has been fomenting its petrochemical regicide since 2021. This synthetic removal has been a long time coming, and is a further move in the right direction toward Oberlin’s goal of becoming a leader in sustainability.
The historical presence of bottled water on Oberlin’s campus, as detailed in my Opinions article published in February 2023 (“Water Bottle Debate Reveals Plastic Environmentalism,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 10, 2023), is both storied and contentious. A student initiative in the late ’90s led to a campus wide ban, yet this ban waned in its efficacy over time, leading to a 2010 motion passed by the Student Senate that reinforced it in dining halls. The oscillatory cycle continued as AVI Foodsystems replaced Bon Appetit as Oberlin’s dining service provider, and due to concerns over shared watering holes during the COVID-19 pandemic, bottled water was reintroduced. As COVID-19 became declassified as a pandemic, and with Oberlin’s vigorous commitment to carbon neutrality by 2025, attention was reoriented toward a bottled water ban. As an environmental scourge whose use is solely predicated by convenience, bottled water conflicts with Oberlin’s image as a leader in sustainability, and the ban arrived not a moment too late. However, it has been met with student complaints and concerns directed toward Oberlin’s Office of Energy and Sustainability. These grievances are misinformed and antithetical to the environmental consciousness we must cultivate as a student body, both to promote sustainability within our campus and throughout the wider world.
Heather Adelman, who is the Sustainability Manager of the OES Office, began the process of removing bottled water by entering into talks with AVI in the spring of 2022. As a student intern at OES, I took direct part in these negotiations, and spoke with former Director of Retail Operations Sarirose Hyldahl about past and current challenges in enacting the ban. AVI’s initial reluctance to enact the ban was based on a prior attempt to remove bottled water from DeCafé and the Rat. After a deluge of complaints from the student body, AVI brought them back into dining spaces on campus. From there, the work continued. Students working in Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies Cindy Frantz’s Advanced Methods in Community-Based Social Marketing class collaborated with OES and AVI in fall 2023. The students conducted surveys to understand the reasoning behind students choosing bottled water and to identify barriers in establishing a ban and opportunities to tackle these challenges. Based on survey findings, OES worked to increase the bottle filter stations on campus and created informational outreach directed toward students on the safety of municipal water and the advantages of reusable bottles.
The reasons behind the ban, are both multiform and obvious.
“Single-use plastic water bottles do not support the College’s Climate Commitment, or Oberlin’s leadership around sustainability,” Adelman wrote in an email to the Review.
The availability of filtered water throughout campus also renders bottled water unnecessary; Oberlin has built more than 50 water filling stations across campus, with more planned this year.
“Single-use plastic water bottles … have a life cycle beyond being consumed and discarded,” Adelman wrote. “The Ellen McArthur Foundation estimates that at current rates of plastic use, there may be more plastic (by weight) in the ocean than fish by 2050.”
Concern over this crushing polymeric weight doesn’t seem to have affected a portion of the Oberlin student body, however, as the embers of the previous reactionary campaign have yet to be snuffed out. As Oberlin students arrived in the fall to find bottled water now extinct on campus, Adelman revealed that students expressed concerns to OES about the safety of Oberlin’s tap water, and sought to return bottled water to Oberlin’s dining halls. Adelman, along with the broader ecosystem of OES, AVI, and environmental groups on campus, seek to dispel these concerns by spreading awareness on the safety of Oberlin’s municipal water supply.
“We … worked to educate campus on the different regulatory process for municipal vs. bottled water and the extensive process the City of Oberlin employs at the drinking water plant to make safe drinking water,” Adelman wrote.
Indeed, misconceptions about bottled water abound, including the perception that it’s safer than regular tap water.
“Bottled water is subject to less stringent disclosure of consumer information by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” Adelman wrote, adding that it often actually comes from municipal water sources, yet “annual water quality reports are not required to be reported.”
Oberlin students can and should place trust in our municipal water systems over bottled water sources. Behind safety descriptions, EPA guidelines, and our own showers and taps lies an unseen and nebulous process of water regulation and distribution. To see and taste these water quality standards in vita reali, I visited Oberlin’s Water Department treatment plant located on Parsons Road. The plant itself is a nondescript brick building overshadowed by the grassy banked hills that house Oberlin’s reservoir, a pentangular mass of water invisible to drivers at street level. Strewn across the rippling water are fisherman kayaks, swarms of northern rough-winged swallows and solitary great blue herons, and even ice-fishing holes in the winter. Subterraneanly, this man-made ecosystem looks quite different.
Bill Albrecht, the Water Division superintendent, graciously guided me through the facility, starting with a descent into the plant’s bottommost fathoms. Here, the concrete walls hummed and whirred under a labyrinth of pipes and meters, regulating the powerful flow of the water that naturally gravitates down from the bed of the reservoir. Albrecht walked me through the process, nearly shouting over the hydraulic din. First, a thin blue pipe containing sodium permanganate oxidizes the flow, incinerating the large debris that collects in the water. Then, it shoots up into a splitter box, which channels the water into a container that treats the water with ferric, a coagulant that latches onto particulates. The water then flows through a flocculator, which clumps together the solids in the water, and then it is passed through massive lime slakers that “softens” the water, a great balancing act that keeps the water from becoming both overly-corrosive and slippery. With a flashlight, Albrecht traced the rippling stream down into the settling basins, which rake away the coagulated sediments in three successive basins. Finally, the now combed-through water is treated with chlorine and fluoride as part of EPA standards and is pH regulated before shooting off toward Oberlin’s two water towers, where they settle to be finally distributed into our sinks, water fountains, pools, and fire hydrants. The process in its entirety resembles a strictly regulated stream of intention that places barriers and assessments at every stage, even before the water gets to the reservoir from the Black River Watershed. Under Aldrecht and his colleagues’ purview, no runaway tributaries of poor standards are allowed to branch off; even the water quality “scare” that occurred in September of last year was solely a taste concern, as Aldrecht notes that due to an algal bloom, the water contained non harmful particulates that the human taste can detect to the parts-per-trillion. Currently, the plant is adopting new technologies and consulting engineers to improve their water treatment process even further. As Aldrecht explained to me, the reservoir has introduced a new bloom buoy, which is solar-powered and sends sound waves through the reservoir to disrupt cyanboacertia’s ability to reproduce and create algae blooms.
When asked about bottled water, Aldrecht expressed both his understanding and concern.
“I get the convenience, but the [bottled water] industry is not nearly as regulated like we are,” Albrecht said.
As Oberlin approaches carbon neutrality through geothermal wells and solar fields, smaller sustainable goals such as eliminating bottled water remain just as important to the cultivation of a broader sustainable mission on campus. From Oberlin’s OES offices to the concrete settling basins of Oberlin’s reservoir, people like Bill Albrecht and Heather Adelman work every day under the shared mission of delivering safe and sustainable living standards to the Oberlin community. It is clear that the concerns regarding Oberlin’s tap water are unfounded, and that removing bottled water is a necessary step in reducing Oberlin’s environmental impact. What remains to be seen is if the student body will get on board with these policies, or risk perspectival myopia from their own plastic containers of stagnation and waste.
