Western Illinois University officials say the school's water bottle refilling stations have kept more than 1 million plastic bottles out of landfills.
School officials said in a news release that the university has three dozen filling stations in campus buildings. Of those, 26 are at the Macomb campus and ten are on the school's Quad Cities campus.
The effort started in 2013 and by spring 2014 the school had 20 water-filling stations. WIU used grant money to install the stations as part of efforts to boost campus sustainability.
Each water-filling station has a counter that displays how many 20-ounce bottles it has saved. Last month employees noticed one of the filling station counters surpassed 100,000 bottles. The school checked all 36 fountains and found the total bottles saved is about 1.09 million.
