SANTA BARBARA - You know the s'Cool Food Initiative helps schools make a healthy lunch and now they want schools to rethink the drink !
Kinko's Founder Paul Orfalea is passionate about ridding the world of single-use plastic water bottles.
New water refilling stations are giving cold filtered water and giving students an alternative to plastic bottles.
The Community Environmental Council and the Orfalea Foundation are installing the EZ H2O stations in several Central Coast schools.
The water stations calculate the number of bottles filled. There are 11 stations running on the Central Coast. They have been used nearly 70 thousand times!
The s'Cool Food Initiative also passed out about 5-thousand stainless steel water bottles to local students to help them Rethink the Drink!
As part of a balanced diet, the s'Cool Food Initiative supports drinking pure water rather than flavored milks, sodas, or energy drinks.
The unit made by Elkay is about $1000 each. They are purchased locally through Ferguson Kitchen and Bath Gallery. They are becoming popular across the country, particularly with universities, and some airports like San Francisco and Portland.
In addition to providing refill stations and canteens, Rethink the Drink also provides educational materials to schools in the form of posters to display near the units and handouts to students.
Student's watch a version of the film "Bag It", followed by a question and answer session about the negative impacts of single use plastics.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American produces about 4.4 lbs. of garbage every day. (29 lbs. per week or 1,600 lbs. per year)
The United States produces approximately 220 million tons of garbage each year. This is equivalent to burying more than 82,000 football fields six feet deep in compacted garbage.
This amount of trash could cover the state of Texas two and half times and also fills enough trucks to form a line to the moon.
To learn more check out this link
http://www.cecsb.org/rethink-the-drink
