S’well Donates 320,000 Water Bottles to New York City Students

The founder of Manhattan-based S’well, a company that markets bottles, is donating 320,000 bottles—one for every high school student in every public or charter school in the city—in an effort to slow the stream of discarded plastic bottles.

New York City Hall and the Department of Education are working on a program called "Bring It" to promote the use of fewer single-use plastic bottles for this school year. In addition, the program is expected to help S’well meet its company-wide goal of displacing 100 million bottles by 2020.

The New York Times has more details:

At 43, Sarah Kauss is old enough to remember going to high school before water came from plastic bottles.

“We would drink out of the water fountain,” she said.

By the time she enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder, in 1993, the bottled-water trend had caught on, but so had environmental consciousness. She remembers being presented with a form containing a pledge not to use plastics. She signed.

Now settled in New York City — her office is a short walk from Madison Square Park in Manhattan — she wants to put something in students’ backpacks besides the usual kaleidoscopic batch of pencils and notebooks, along with the inevitable smushed snacks and the obligatory headphones: Reusable, stainless-steel water bottles.

Read the full article here.