Water Conservation

Fill It Forward

In August of 2018, the Office of Sustainability partnered with FSA to introduce the Fill It Forward program to the university. The Fill It Forward program is designed to incentivize students to use reusable water bottles on campus by giving prizes for refilling their bottles and discontinuing the use of plastic disposable bottles. Since its inception in August of 2018 there have been over 26,000 refills registered on the Fill It Forward app.

 

How To Get Involved:

1. Bring your dishwasher safe refillable water bottle or mug to campus and adhere your new cup tag tag to it. You can get a red SBU logo tag for your water bottle or a black SBU logo tag for your coffee mug at the Office of Sustainability in Service Building 7, #154.
2. Download the Fill it Forward app onto your smartphone to begin scanning your tag each time you refill, then easily track waste diverted, see emissions saved, and observe how much ocean pollution has been avoided.
3. Students are entered into weekly prize drawings following their 20th refill, so always remember to scan your tag! Prizes supplied by the Office of Sustainability include Wolfie Wallet gift cards, water bottles, lanyards and more.

Help Make a Difference!

When calculating a persons average annual consumption of water, in most cases the true cost of a ‘cup of water’ is far less than $0.02. Yet accessing clean water remains a daily challenge for children and families globally.

• Every day women and girls spend 200 million hours collecting water.
• Water and sanitation-related diseases kill nearly 1 million people annually.
• Globally 844 million people – 1 in 9 – lack access to safe water.

When a refill tag is scanned with the app, users help give a symbolic ‘cup of clean water’ that is equivalent to a minimum $0.02 donation from Fill It Forward. These individual actions add up quickly and as project milestones are achieved, Fill It Forward sends donations to charitable partners with a focus on the development of water project infrastructure in areas where people need it most. These trusted charitable partners specialize in providing access to water, hygiene, and sanitation to high priority communities. Their proactive approach often takes the form of long term (5- 10 year) initiatives, focused on implementing sustainable infrastructure that solve core issues both locally and globally. 

Water Bottle Filling Stations

Stony Brook University currently has over 100 water bottle filling stations in academic and residential buildings available to the campus community. 

Water Bottle Filling Station Dashboard