Designed by: Benji Kent
In schools and communities bottled water has become the norm despite the energy it wastes and unnecessary garbage it produces. Take a stand in your community against bottled water by raising awareness on bottled water issues, promoting the benefits of tap and selling reusable water bottles as an alternative. Reusable water bottles not only lower a user’s carbon footprint, they promote the use of Toronto tap water, a cheap, high quality eco-alternative.
Ban the Bottle 101
Time: Prep ~ 4-6 months
Cost: $15-22 per bottle, $30-100 for promotion
Grade Range: 10-12
Target: Whole School
Note: Click HERE to get a copy of our Energy Shift Checklist to help guide your team through the project.
Step 1 ~ Permission:
To start off this campaign, you’ll need permission both to sell the metal water bottles on school property and to receive any necessary start up costs for purchasing bottles. If your school is unable to purchase the bottles before the fundraiser, simply set up a system where students pay for their bottles before receiving them so the bottle costs are already covered.
Step 2 ~Research:
There are a number of companies producing metal water bottles, from Switzerland’s stylish aluminum Sigg bottles to Klean Kanteen’s simple stainless steel bottles. Research different distributors in your area to find the best fit for your school, simply go online and search “distributor, (name of bottle brand)”. Before contacting your chosen distributors for a price quote decide on the size, style, approximate quantity, whether you’d like to personalize the bottle with a school logo and the maximum cost for the bottles you’d like to order. If you’ve decided to pay the extra cost to personalize the bottles, start by creating high-resolution images in the correct size, decide as a group what works best and then send the image to the distributor.
Step 3 ~ Order
If you’ve decide to order a set number of bottles order now so they’re available when you start your promotion campaign. If you’re going to have students pay for their bottle first, hold off on this step until after your promotion.
Step 4 ~ Promotion
Designed by: Anji Kim
Create a full school promotion campaign to spread the word on the bottles you’ll be selling. Types of promotion include, posters, displays, announcements, jingles, an assembly and/or staged events. The key to promotion is to be creative and develop ideas that will engage the student body. To create a strong message, research hard-hitting facts on bottled water and feature them in your campaign. A great place to start your search is insidethebottle.org. Creating teams for different areas of promotion (for example, posters, announcements) is a great way to organize your effort and will help you produce promotional materials in a shorter time frame. Promotion ideas include: Bottle Free Zone posters at school entrances and water fountains, a catchy jingle to play between classes, an assembly with a guest speaker, making buttons, placing vinyl stickers around the school, creating a display using empty water bottles, staging a fake protest, wearing campaign specific T-shirts or ties, holding a bottled water taste test, having speakers go to each class and displaying the metal bottles students can buy.
Button designed by: Anji Kim
Step 5 ~ Sell:
Now that everyone at school knows you’re selling bottles and why they should be using them, set up a station to sell them. Ideally this would be done within the same time frame as your promotion campaign. Make sure you make clear announcements on where and when you’ll be selling bottles. Create a deadline for purchasing bottles so students are encouraged to buy a bottle before they sell out. In addition to having a prominent selling station that is manned during a time like lunch, provide first period classes with order forms that you collect by the deadline.
Step 6 ~ Celebrate:
After your campaign is complete, let the school know how many bottles were purchased. To highlight the significance of their decision to turn to tap you could do an audit on the number of plastic water bottles in the recycling bin before and after the campaign, or announce facts on the amount of energy saved through their purchase. For an easy calculation, use the Pacific Institute’s estimate that the production and shipment of one bottle of water is equal to filling that bottle a quarter full with oil.
