Emery School District in Hot Water Over Bottled Water Vending Idea

The Emery Unified School District has drawn the ire of members of the public and at least two City Council members over a scheme made public at tonight's School Board meeting to raise revenue by installing bottled water vending machines on the school campus.  The plan, presented by Food Services and Wellness Director Juliette Dunn, would raise approximately $10,000 per year in revenue she said.  But vending machines selling plastic water bottles to students would also run counter to the District's own waste stream reduction goals, a duplicity not lost on Council members Christian Patz and Dianne Martinez, both of whom wrote trenchant letters to the Board.  
The Board did not take action on the plan that member Cruz Vargas called "great" but vowed to discuss the idea further at a future meeting after noting Councilman Patz's letter.

Mr Patz's circumstantiated and pointed letter to the Board and Superintendent, intercepted by the Tattler, is presented:

 

Dear Emery Superintendent and School Board,

In reading your AgendaOnline for Wednesday August 22, I was shocked to see that your nutrition plan was investigating vending machines for disposable water bottles.  The goal of the plan was to raise $10,000 per year.  Please reject this plan. Instead, sell branded reusable water bottles.

There are a number of things wrong with this plan, but my top three are,

1)   Raising money off your majority low income students drinking of water

2)   Adding 13,000 to 40,000 water bottles to the waste stream

3)   Teaching students that disposable water bottles are acceptable

The environment and social good should come before revenue.  If it were not against state law, I suspect the plan would have been for the vending machines to contain soda and candy.

To generate that level of income, the school would need to sell anywhere from 13,000 to 40,000 bottles per year depending on cost and sale price.  Assuming the total cost per bottle is $0.25, including cost and maintenance of machines plus staff time to deal with the day-to-day usage, the school would need to sell 13,000 bottles at $1.00 to net $10,000.  The number of bottles increases to 40,000 if the price is $0.50.

Approximately seventy percent of your students have been identified as socially economically disadvantaged.  The projection of $10,000 of income means student spending more than that amount.  Emery has about 700 students, meaning each student would be spending between $20 and $30 per year.  That assumes that the student would purchase at the same rate.  It is more likely that the middle and high school students would be the ones making the purchases, increasing the cost per student to $50 to $100 per year.  That is one bottle every two days.

Studies show that water bottle get recycled at less than a fifty percent rate.  About fifty percent of recyclables are never recycled. Using the smallest number of bottles sold, 13,000 at $1.00, only 3,250 would be recycled.  The remaining 9,750 bottles would end up in the landfill or worse, the ocean.  A plastic bottle takes 450 years to decompose.  Double or triple those numbers if the price was lower.

As educators, we are role models.  Students at Emery are learning life long habits.  Making water bottles easily accessible sends the message that they are acceptable.  They are not.  The new facility has quality tap water and bottle fill stations.  There is an opportunity for students to take pride in reducing their waste stream.  Council Member Martinez has worked hard to partner the school with the Alameda County Waste Management

Authority to teach composting, recycling, and responsible citizenship.  Build on that by rejecting disposable water bottles.

A better option for students is a reusable water bottle with a school logo.  We can probably find a sponsor to cover the cost of the bottles.  Ideally, we would distribute them to students sell them to parents, and gift them to partners.  A quick search showed that a nice metal bottle with the school's logo would cost less than $2.50 per unit.  Selling them for $5 per student (700 students), $15 per parent (300) and community members, only 300 would need to be sold to community members to earn the $10,000.  Even fewer if there was a sponsor, which should be easy to find.

Thank you,

Christian Patz

“A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change… Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean. Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish” – The Guardian, June 28, 2017