by Jason Pessel

Hey NYU — a cheap and eco-friendly alternative to bottled water is here!

We know you love carrying your reusable bottles on campus, but we also know that most of you buy bottled water when you’re off campus. Thanks to a Green Grant project from the Office of Sustainability called Reefill, now you can fill your reusable bottles wherever you go.  It’s all part of an effort to help the NYU community reduce its consumption of bottled water, which is an extremely wasteful product.  Not only does it create tons of plastic waste (literally), but its manufacture and transportation wastes water and oil and creates greenhouse gases.  All for a product that is often just purified municipal water, as is the case with Aquafina and Dasani.  Meanwhile, the water from our tap is tested far more often and rigorously than bottled water and NYC’s consistently beats bottled water in taste tests.

Reefill lets you enjoy the convenience of bottled water without the waste and high cost.  It is a new NYU service that provides unlimited access to cold, filtered water in local businesses around campus, such as student favorites like City Bakery, Kuku Canteen, and The Uncommons.  Using the Reefill app —  which is free to download from the App Store and Google Play — you find the nearest station, activate it with your phone’s Bluetooth, and fill your reusable water bottle with cold, filtered water in seconds.

In addition to showing where you can find Reefill stations off campus, the app also shows where you can find water fountains and bottle fillers on campus in NYU buildings.  Just download the app and verify your netID to see where in each building you can go to fill up.

With the Reefill app, filling up on campus is easy and free.  And filling up off campus costs just $1.99 per month for unlimited access.  So for the cost of just one bottled water, you get an entire month of unlimited access to cold, filtered water at all Reefill locations.  And you can use promo code NYUGREEN to try the off campus network for free for a month.  The $1.99 fee helps cover the operating costs of the network, including filter changes and station maintenance, and with enough support, will help us add additional stations so that even more NYU community members can benefit from the service.

The Reefill app also tracks how many plastic bottles you and the entire network have saved by refilling your reusable water bottle.  The service, which just launched, has already saved a few hundred plastic bottles from the landfill and we can’t wait to see how many the NYU community will have saved by year’s end!

As you use the app, let us know how we can improve the service by emailing support@reefill.com or tweeting @reefillH2O.  And if you’re interested in helping spread the word around NYU, just send us a note.

Jason Pessel (Stern ‘15) created Reefill with two friends and a lot of help from the Office of Sustainability.  Feel free to email him at jason.pessel@stern.nyu.edu if you have any questions or concerns about the service.  The Reefill team loves feedback of all kinds!