Haas School of Business Goes Bottle-less

Gerardo Campos, Facilities and Building Manager at Haas School of Business, next to his innovative water cooler.

Bottle-less Water Coolers
The typical water cooler uses large plastic bottles of water that are transported by trucks. At the Haas School of Business, there is a water cooler that is bottle-less and thus uses less energy and resources. Over the past winter break, Gerardo Campos, the facilities and building operations manager for Haas, retrofitted several water coolers by directly piping water from the sink to the dispensing unit. Without large plastic bottles, the water cooler still serves filtered water that is able to be chilled or warmed. Many positive side effects occurred as Campos notes, "This [innovation] has taken away the unsightliness of keeping 25 water bottles and containers in a small space and [decreased] our costs for providing water to our community by about $200 a month and [eliminated] the costs of delivery to deliver/pick-up empties." He also mentions that they will "avoid those mishaps and cleanings when someone drops [a plastic bottle]."

Best of all, this change did not cost him a single cent.

Story by Joanna Young, Student Sustainability Communications Associate, Office of Sustainability

First Published:
Bright Green News, July 2009