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Action: Drink up! Tap water, that is.
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Ian and Nick Taking Turns at the Drinking Fountain. Creative Commons photo by Sean Dreilinger
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Drinking Water Quality --- Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) regularly tests its water for 179 compounds, including metals, chemical contaminants and disease-causing organisms. From 2001 through 2008, SPU-supplied water easily met all state and federal drinking water standards. No compounds were detected above allowable levels. (view data graph)
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Our drinking water is some of the best in North American, which is one good reason to drink up. But consider also that bottled water costs 2400 times as much and consider the greenhouse gases we would avoid generating from drinking tap water - over 5,400 tons of gases a year if Seattle stopped drinking bottled water.
Action Discussion
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 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.
One more thing -- to protect our water supply, we protect our watersheds with stewardship that supports a lot of ecoservices.