In 2020, Loyola removed carbon filters from its water bottle filling stations throughout its Lake Shore, Water Tower and Health Sciences campuses — a decision the university is now reversing with a rollout of brand-new filters.
In 2020, Loyola removed carbon filters from its water bottle filling stations throughout its Lake Shore, Water Tower and Health Sciences campuses — a decision the university is now reversing with a rollout of brand-new filters.
Installation of these filters is set to begin during winter break, according to Shaun Terranova, director of occupational health and safety.
Loyola’s Facilities department ordered around 100 filters at the beginning of the fall semester and some have already been shipped to the Lake Shore Campus, according to Terranova.
“Loyola strives to make sure that its students and staff, its faculty, everybody is safe,” Terranova said. “Nobody wants to have good water quality more than the university.”
Loyola banned the sale of plastic water bottles on campus in 2012, according to the School of Environmental Sustainability website. The ban was possible because of the establishment of water bottle filling stations on all three campuses.
Daniel Becker, a chemistry professor, wrote in an email to The Phoenix he was concerned about the removal of the stations’ carbon, or activated charcoal, filters when the campuses were shut down in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Loyola staff member since 2004, Becker wrote he contacted the Facilities department multiple times with concerns over the past year but said they weren’t interested in the issue.
Becker wrote he noticed a filling station in the Quinlan Life Sciences Building had a red indicator light in December 2021, which meant the filter needed to be replaced. Not long after, the light turned off completely, and Becker filed a work request asking for its replacement. The work request was then labeled as “completed” despite the light remaining off, according to Becker.
Terranova said The filters started to be removed in 2020 at the advice of Loyola’s water consultancy firm Fehr Solutions, which said bacteria and mold may develop when no water runs through filters.
The filters’ removal is an issue of health and sustainability for Becker, who wrote he was concerned about trace pollutants and hazardous chlorinated organic compounds like atrazine and triazine herbicides in the water.
Carbon filters cheaply and effectively sift out those compounds which can sometimes be cancer-causing, according to Becker. Due to the lack of filters, Becker wrote he’s also been less likely to use the filling stations.
“I’ve been a proponent of environmental sustainability,” Becker wrote. “Part of environmental sustainability is individuals’ health.”
Like the rest of Chicago, Loyola gets its water from Lake Michigan, which has suffered from pollution in the past, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2017, the steel company U.S. Steel dumped an undisclosed amount of the toxic carcinogen chromium into the lake, according to the Associated Press.
The city’s water quality exceeds the standards set by both the Illinois and federal branches of the EPA, as well as the water drinking industry, according to the city of Chicago’s website. However, the organizations said the standards still allow for some level of bacteria.
“We’re going one step above,” Terranova said. “We’re doing an extra level of due diligence, I would say, to put the filters on.”
Whenever the stations’ usage decreases for any reason, whether due to COVID-19 or fewer students on campus in the summer, the university still turns on the water to make sure enough is running through to avoid bacteria and mold, according to Terranova.
Becker wrote how Fehr Solutions wouldn’t be able to detect the miniscule trace pollutants and suggested Loyola pay them to confirm the water was safe to drink.
In an email to The Phoenix, founder Mike Fehr wrote he wasn’t sure how Becker researched the firm’s analytical capabilities. Fehr Solutions doesn’t routinely test for trihalomethanes — a kind of chlorinated compound — because their levels don’t change significantly after leaving the treatment facility and meet current EPA requirements, according to Fehr.
Fehr wrote it’s nonsensical to ask about removing chlorine and some trihalomethanes from water with pathogenic organisms.
Becker wrote he was happy to hear of the university’s decision to install new filters but disappointed they were removed in the first place. He said his emails still remain unanswered by sustainability director Aaron Durnbaugh and assistant vice president for Facilities and Campus Operations Hamlet Gonzalez.
“It isn’t accurate to say that Facilities didn’t respond,” Durnbaugh wrote in an email to The Phoenix. “They did in the spring. I just don’t know if they did for any subsequent requests over the summer or into the fall.”
Gonzalez wrote in an email to The Phoenix that Becker’s water filter preference was more nuanced than most of the university’s stakeholders’ and his concerns about chlorine was beyond the university’s scope to address.
“I find it odd and even troubling that although Loyola’s Sustainability Team pushed for water filtration a dozen years ago to great fanfare, there didn’t seem to be any interest or involvement by IES in the post-COVID elimination of filtration,” Becker wrote.
Filters are necessary for residence halls like Regis and Campion because the fountain and tap water can come out cloudy and taste metallic, according to Selogi Sloey, a second-year student and member of the Student Environmental Alliance.
“Some of that water is almost opaquely white, like a weird version of milk, and eventually you’re like, ‘I don’t want to drink this,’” Sloey said.
Sloey said he thought Loyola’s environmental sustainability initiative was better than most universities — including its elimination of natural gas usage and lowering its carbon footprint — but there were still shortcomings.
“They still use a whole bunch of fertilizers that run off in the lake, they still fund weird construction projects that of course use a lot of fossil fuels,” Sloey said.
Sloey said he invested in a Brita filter for his dorm room after feeling inconvenienced by the stations’ unpredictable water quality as well as the limited hours of the dining halls, which also offer water from the soda machines. However, he said the Brita cleans so much from the water it becomes defunct within three months.
This article was written by Mao Reynolds
Featured image by Amber Cerpa / The Phoenix
