This article is the first in a series on Green Grants: The People Behind the Projects. Below is an interview with Jason Pessel (NYU Stern MBA ’15), who received a Green Grant for his project, Reefill. Reefill is a network of stations that gives members access to cold, filtered tap water throughout NYU’s campus and the greater NYC community. This year, Reefill memberships are free to all NYU students. 

 

GG: Where did you get the idea for your Green Grants project?

JP: It started as an idea when I was walking through Manhattan. There’s no water fountains that you can find or anything–they just don’t exist in the middle of Manhattan. So I bought bottled water, and I was with my cousin and he started screaming at me, saying “That’s tap water! What are you doing? You are making all this waste!” So I started researching and realized that like 50% of bottled water is tap water, and disposed water bottles lead to problems with plastic in our oceans. In doing that research, before I was even at NYU, I realized when we buy bottled water, we are just buying tap water–it’s chilled and filtered, and then they are putting a fancy label on it and we are spending a lot of money on it and it is creating all this waste. But tap water is pretty much everywhere, so why couldn’t we find another way to make chilled and filtered tap water on-the-go that’s easier for people to access? So that kind of became the idea.

GG: From your Green Grants project, what sustainability issue do you want people to become more aware about? 

JP: I want people to be aware of the problem with plastic waste and the ridiculousness of bottled water. The app we created lets people fill-up at 0ff-campus locations, but for NYU students it lets them find places to fill-up on campus. The grand goal of Reefill is that no NYU student ever buys bottled water again. We have worked with Take Back the Tap, which is an undergraduate group trying to ban bottled water on campus; starting this year, it’s already banned in the dining halls. But a University of Vermont study showed that [when they banned bottled water on campus], people started to drink more sugary beverages. I think that study may have been commissioned by the bottled water industry, but nonetheless, you want to make sure people are drinking healthily. If people want water, they should be able to get filtered water without buying bottled water, so that’s our main goal.

GG: What advice would you give to future grantees?

JP: We started the [Green Grants] process with an expression of interest (EOI), which we got a lot of good feedback from there and thought about [our project] differently because of the feedback. That’s something I think everyone should do instead of just going through with the application right off the bat; they should do the EOI because otherwise you might be wasting time with the direction you’re going. And we did not get the grant the first time they considered it. We changed some things, mostly bringing off-campus locations closer and making it so that people could find on-campus locations more easily–the fact that we could add Reefill stations within the NYU community made a lot of sense, but it wasn’t something we considered for the first round. So then we reapplied and made it more NYU-centric, which was important for getting accepted. So yeah, the EOI is huge. Then the second big piece of advice for someone else is if you don’t get accepted, listen to the feedback and do it again. As long as you follow what they are looking for, you have a good chance of probably getting accepted the next time around.

GG: If you had unlimited resources, what would your ideal Green Grants project look like?

JP: We look at any walkable urban environment, anywhere people walk around and otherwise would be buying bottled water when they’re on the go, [Reefill] is the solution for that simple scenario. We actually ran an Indiegogo campaign to expand, and then we had a NowThis video that went viral. It was cool, but we were also overwhelmed–we were getting like a thousand emails a day from people and we were like there’s three of us, so we still didn’t respond to most of them, but people in Romania, Australia, Europe were like “Please come to our city” and “How can we set this up here?” Our answer was: “we are focused on New York right now but we would love to be there.” So from that we realized this could work globally, I mean it doesn’t work in places like India where we got a lot of response, at least at this point, because they have tap water issues. It would be awesome if there was a solution that worked well there because they need [access to filtered water] even more than NYC where the tap water is great. Even in places like Las Vegas, Arizona…the water there is apparently terrible–this is the feedback we’ve gotten–but having this there is something apparently people are really enthusiastic about. The point is to never charge people for water, but to give them alternative access to water that saves them money. The system is set up so that you can fill up as much water as you want–there are no restrictions on water itself, [Reefill] is really just a delivery mechanism that costs money to set up and maintain.

GG: What from your past experiences inspired your interest in sustainability?

JP: I’m from Ohio, and there were always woods in my backyard and we would explore the creek back there, so I was always into nature I guess. For this particular project, in Ohio too we would always drink tap water, and I remember Fiji [Water] ran an ad campaign and the billboard said, “Because it’s not bottled in Cleveland,” and so then Cleveland did all these tests to show contaminants in Cleveland tap water versus Fiji bottled water, and Cleveland might have been biased in how they were doing it, but they showed that Cleveland water actually had less contaminants than Fiji water. That always stuck with me too–it’s ridiculous and awesome.

GG: What would you recommend students interested in sustainability, leadership, and entrepreneurship check out? 

JP: The guy that started Seventh Generation [Jeffrey Hollender] teaches a class at Stern [Sustainable Business & The New Economy]–I didn’t take it, it sounded awesome it just never worked out in my schedule–and now Stern has a Sustainability Center, which didn’t exist until maybe last year so I missed that. For this project itself, Elizabeth Royte wrote a book called Bottlemania, all about how bottled water is destroying small towns–it takes their water out, they don’t have any left, on top of the environmental impact of the bottles itself–that was a great book. As far as what I would want people to know about the Green Grants program, it’s pretty amazing that there is this program here, that you obviously have to focus on helping NYU, but they want to incubate programs and projects that have a much larger scale and act as a source of funding to help you prove a concept, make it work at NYU, and they encourage you to be successful and spread it widely. Just the fact that the office is so supportive, and helps you incubate something, we were really excited to even find out that [the Green Grants program] existed.

This interview has been modified and condensed for clarity. 

Interested in applying for a Green Grant? Find more information here.