By Vinny Porco | December 13th, 2025
For just under two years, the U of L Sustainability Council has looked to curtail the sale and use of single-use water bottles on campus.
The initiative started in late 2023 when former university president Kim Schatzel requested that the Sustainability Council assemble a committee and submit a “Bottled Water Phase Out Plan” following a 20-minute overall sustainability briefing on Nov. 30, 2023.
In an interview with The Louisville Cardinal, Assistant to the Provost for Sustainability Initiatives Justin Mog described the process from its inception.
“[Schatzel] asked for a briefing on sustainability, which was great because no previous president ever asked for that,” Mog said.
The project, while ambitious, is not unprecedented. Schools such as those in the University of California System have already implemented their own plans.
Although eliminating single-use plastic water bottles has been at the forefront of the project, much of the committee’s emphasis has involved avoiding all packaged water on campus.
Mog noted that even though packaging materials such as cardboard and aluminium are more recyclable than plastic, there are several factors that make them less than ideal.
For one, water packaged in aluminum could cost an estimated three and a half times more per unit than plastic bottles, according to the committee’s Bottled Water Phase Out Plan. Shifting to aluminum would raise the cost for campus consumers as well as companies like Aramark and Pepsi that sell packaged water on campus.
Another deterrent is that recycling these materials consumes energy and money, a cost that Mog said is paid by U of L students’ tuition.
“While recycling is good and worthy of doing, it’s like the worst case scenario,” Mog said. “It’s what you do when you haven’t fixed the problem upstream.”
Louisville Water Company’s award-winning tap water is the committee’s preferred solution to the problem upstream.
The aforementioned Bottled Water Phase Out Plan, completed in December 2024, sought to reduce the use and purchasing of bottled water by installing more water filling stations on campus.
Mog told The Cardinal that a follow-up with the Provost’s Office determined the cost and logistics.
“That’s when we came up with this list of I believe 35 [filling] stations that we need, and we were asking them for…I think it’s $180,000 to install them,” Mog recalled.
The cost of filling stations can range depending on plumbing, age of existing water fountains and weather exposure.
Upgrading newer water fountains to filling stations would require less intricate installation, whereas upgrading older fountains could possibly entail a plumbing overhaul.
Additionally, filling stations at many U of L athletic facilities could call for an additional cost in needing to be freezeproof, and could require creative placement solutions.
With plans to implement filling stations as an eventual replacement, the committee and overall Sustainability Council sought to eliminate the sale of packaged water.
Accomplishing this meant becoming involved in U of L’s “Pouring Rights” contract that is set to expire in 2026. The contract gives Pepsi exclusive selling and marketing rights for beverages on campus.
The committee’s Bottled Water Phase Out Plan provides a three-year plan, “Next Steps” of eliminating packaged water and implementation of more sustainable practices originally recommended to begin in 2025.
However, progress involving U of L’s Pouring Rights contract has halted.
Mog told The Cardinal that rather than holding a full Request for Proposal (RFP) process that would include the review of outside bids, the university decided to simply renegotiate the contract with Pepsi for an extension.
Additionally, Mog says then-Interim University Provost Katie Cardarelli told him in an Oct. 8 meeting that although she supported the idea, she did not feel comfortable addressing the Pouring Rights contract given her interim status.
On Dec. 2, President Gerry Bradley announced in a university-wide email that Katie Cardarelli has been officially hired as university provost.
When asked by The Cardinal if Provost Cardarelli would be open to revisiting the Pouring Rights contract, U of L Vice President of Marketing and Communications John Karman stated, “The provost is very supportive of sustainability issues.”
Provost Cardarelli demonstrated her support following her Oct. 8 meeting with Mog by pledging $25,000 from the Provost’s Office budget toward the installation of filling stations. Mog praised the action, saying, “I’ve learned over the years that the Provost’s Office doesn’t sit on a huge pile of cash.”
This money will fund the installation of five filling stations across the Belknap and Health Sciences Campuses.
Mog said that locations were strategically chosen by the committee based on visibility, traffic and placement within buildings.
They will be located within Grawmeyer Hall, Ekstrom Library, Shumaker Research Building, HSC’s Clinical Translational Research Building and HSC Tower.
Beyond this funding, Mog and the committee are focused on next steps in all directions.
The Sustainability Council recently applied for a $5,000 grant through the Louisville-located Snowy Owl Foundation with the goal of starting a campus “Fill It Forward” campaign.
Fill It Forward is a nonprofit organization founded in 2011 to combat the use of single-use plastics. The organization has donated over $2 million to global sustainability projects since then and offered community-wide sustainability challenges that use QR codes to track bottle-filling.
In the meantime, Mog remains optimistic that the committee can make change.
“Maybe what we could do first instead is tackle university dollars being spent on bottled water,” he said. “So couldn’t we develop an internal policy irrespective of that Pepsi contract that says we’re not going to spend money on bottled water as a university?”
Mog also expressed optimism that the contract issue wasn’t completely lost, saying, “I imagine it’ll be an opportunity for another renegotiation in maybe even as short as a year.”
Photo by Jai’Michael Anderson / The Louisville Cardinal
