Bottles in Ballantine Hall educate on clean water

It’s just a pile of used, plastic water bottles, but for one IU organization, it represents the struggle of millions.

For the past week, the first floor of Ballantine Hall has been home to a mass of water bottles assembled by the Public Health and Water division of the IU Global Brigades.

There are 750 bottles in the display, which represents the number of water bottles used in the United States every half second.

Collin Abbott, global public health brigades president at IU, said the artwork is all about spreading knowledge.

“The main goal is to bring awareness to people here on campus that there is so much use of plastic water bottles when there doesn’t need to be,” he said.

The display has been in the works since last semester and is a revamping of a similar project done last school year. That awareness effort used only a few hundred strung-together water bottles and was hung in Jordan Hall.

This year, the display has doubled in size and moved to a roomier location in the traffic-heavy Ballantine Hall. Group members were originally inspired by a 2009 New York City urban art display to raise awareness of plastic water bottle use.
 
Global Brigades took that concept and adjusted it to promote clean water availability across the globe, said junior Brittany McCoy, awareness committee chair for the public health brigade.

Abbott contrasted the condition of water in the United States with its state in other nations.

“We have all these resources at hand. We go to the grocery store to buy bottled water,” Abbott said. “People have to walk miles to even reach the water, which
is dirty.”

Fifteen members worked on the display and completed it in two days, which was better than expected, Abbott said. Many of the bottles used in the display were collected on bottle raids in Ballantine Hall after club meetings and then stored in members’ closets and bedrooms until the group got approval by building officials. 

“It’s not meant to bash anyone here,” he said. “It’s just to bring awareness and to think of ways to get the ball rolling on change.”

The display will be moved this evening to Jordan Hall for a week. After that, it will most likely be recycled.

At IU, there are a number of different sub-chapters within Global Brigades. Public health and water work together while at IU, but go on different service trips to different locations.

The water brigade focuses more on creating a sustainable, and most importantly, sanitary water system for communities.

The public health brigade often works in small, rural villages. A goal of the brigade is to educate the people of the community about how to maintain the infrastructure for use long after the students have left, McCoy said.

Members help the community by building latrines, water storage units, concrete floors and eco-friendly stoves. The stoves allow smoke to escape from the home, reducing respiratory illnesses. Concrete floors prevent dirt-born parasites and muddy floors.

McCoy first joined Global Brigades at IU during her freshman year, but she did not go on a service trip until her sophomore year. On that trip to Honduras, she said she saw and worked directly with rural village people who didn’t have many of the necessities or knowledge those in the United States do.

This spring, she’ll return to Honduras.

“It makes you really appreciative of what you have here, and it makes you want to go back and help more, which is why I’m going back,” she said.