New Report Finds Seattle’s Tap Water is the “Gold Standard”
Mayor Nickels launches campaign linking water with climate change

For immediate release: 5/07/08

For more information, Contact: Seattle Public Utilities Customer Service, (206) 684-3000

SEATTLE — Mayor Greg Nickels today kicked off a six-week public awareness campaign aimed at promoting the quality of Seattle’s drinking water and encouraging people to stop buying bottled water.

“Drink Up, Seattle!” coincides with the release this week of Seattle’s annual drinking water quality report, which concludes that Seattle’s water is among the best in any major city in North America. Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) regularly tests its water for 179 compounds, including metals, chemical contaminants and disease-causing organisms. None of the monitored compounds were found in SPU’s testing.

“Seattle offers the ‘gold standard’ in water quality,” Nickels said. “What flows from our taps is some of the finest-tasting, purest-source water in the world. That’s why it makes little sense for Seattlites to waste their money on bottled water — which costs 2,400 times as much as tap water and creates thousands of tons of greenhouse gases.”

A gallon of Seattle water from the Tolt or Cedar River Watersheds costs just one-third of one-cent — compared to at least 79 cents for a pint of bottled water. In March, Nickels ordered all City departments to stop purchasing bottled water to reduce waste and climate pollution.

In 2006, Americans bought more than 60 billion pints of bottled water, requiring nearly 900,000 tons of plastic or more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation. That adds up to more than 2.5 million tons of greenhouse gases that could have been avoided by drinking tap water.

Seattle residents use the equivalent of about 354,127 pint bottles of water each day. That equals to some 40,719 barrels of oil each year, creating about 5,439 tons of greenhouse gases.

Nationally, nine out of every 10 plastic water bottles end up in landfills — not in recycling. In Seattle, the recycling rate is closer to 49 percent, but those bottles still require huge amounts of energy to produce and transport.

Two pristine surface water sources provide the majority of water for Seattle’s water system: the Cedar River and the South Fork Tolt River. These two river systems begin in the Cascade Mountains and have very large protected watersheds.

Because the watersheds are publicly owned, SPU is able to vigorously safeguard its water sources through a comprehensive watershed protection program. This program prohibits agricultural, industrial, recreational activities and human habitation in the watersheds. That means there is little opportunity for contaminants to enter the water.

Read Seattle’s annual water quality report.

Visit the mayor’s web site at. Get the mayor’s inside view on initiatives to promote transportation, public safety, economic opportunity and healthy communities by signing up for The Nickels Newsletter.

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Seattle Public Utilities