A new Slop University paper describes a flow-metered refill tap and its chalkboard-style tally, and reports the standing allocation rule Facilities adopted once each nearest tap's figure set its school's share.
Six foyer taps, one board reading "Bottles saved today", and a share of the term's allocation that follows the figure.
The steward who keeps a teaching precinct’s drinking taps running has, for one term, also kept its score. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes the flow-metered tap the steward built and the allocation that Facilities has since attached to it.
Each of six foyer taps converts the water it dispenses into 600 mL bottle-equivalents and posts the running total on a slate-effect board headed “Bottles saved today”. Once the term’s plastics-reduction allocation was apportioned by those totals, every tap recorded a higher daily figure, with or without a board to read it from.
The tap was already there. What the term added was somewhere for its number to go.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies
Facilities has confirmed the reading as the standing basis of the apportionment and has undertaken to add a tap wherever a school’s share declines. “We are grateful to everyone who passed the tap this term, whatever they did there,” said Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate.
The build itself is modest: a turbine sensor in the supply line, a small controller, an e-ink panel and a reset at three each morning. The paper sets out the parts and the logic in enough detail for another precinct to repeat them.
The University is glad to see an ordinary piece of precinct equipment carry so much of a term’s reporting.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.w7f374.