EPA Honors WaterSense 2016 Sustained Excellence Winners
The winners were chosen from nearly 1,700 WaterSense partners that have partnered with EPA to produce and promote water-efficient products, programs, and homes.
EPA honored 20 businesses, municipalities, utilities, and organizations this month for their commitment to protecting the environment through water efficiency. On the program's 10th anniversary, EPA reported that its WaterSense partners have helped Americans save more than 1.5 trillion gallons of water and $32.6 billion in water and energy bills to date.
"Over the past decade, EPA's WaterSense partners have made WaterSense more than just a label: It's become a way of life," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said. "Our changing climate impacts water quality and supplies, and we need to ensure that more Americans are saving water now so that we can protect this precious resource for future generations."
The 2016 Sustained Excellence Award winners are:
- Delta Faucet Company (Indiana), a two-time Sustained Excellence winner, for spreading the word about the performance of WaterSense labeled showerheads by featuring them at outdoor showering stations that helped clean more than 34,000 runners at Warrior Dash races across the country as part of its HappiMess campaign.
- Kohler Co. (Wisconsin), which earned its fourth Sustained Excellence Award by, in part, co-sponsoring the Change the Course campaign to encourage consumers to pledge to reduce water use and providing mobile showering stations with WaterSense labeled showerheads, toilets, and faucets that reached more than 2,000 San Francisco residents in need and 100,000 Bonnaroo music festival attendees who used showering stations.
- Home Depot (Georgia), a two-time Sustained Excellence winner. All toilets and bathroom faucets sold in its stores now are WaterSense labeled.
- KB Home (California), which received its second consecutive Sustained Excellence Award for building 233 WaterSense-labeled homes in 2015, a 142 percent increase from 2014.
The WaterSense 2016 Partners of the Year included Promotional Partner of the Year Athens-Clarke County (Georgia) Public Utilities Department's Water Conservation Office, which expanded its Certified Blue restaurant program to include 33 new local businesses and distributed "We're for Water" activity sheets for kids to complete while waiting for meals; Promotional Partner of the Year Citrus County (Florida) Utilities' We’re for Water Classroom Challenge; Promotional Partner of the Year Charlottesville (Virginia) for promoting WaterSense-labeled products during its Love Your Landscape contest during Sprinkler Spruce-Up 2015; Promotional Partner of the Year Cobb County (Georgia) Water System and its new mascot, Tappy the Turtle, for promoting WaterSense campaigns in 2015;
Promotional Partner of the Year Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, for the Great Plumbing Fixture Giveaway; Licensed Certification Provider Partner of the Year Energy Inspectors Corporation (Nevada) for certifying 233 homes for KB Home to meet the WaterSense-labeled homes specification; and
Professional Certifying Organization Partner of the Year The Sonoma-Marin (California) Saving Water Partnership, which continued to expand the reach of its WaterSense-labeled Qualified Water Efficient Landscape (QWEL) certification program.
Nine other partners received Excellence Awards to recognize their support for a specific aspect of the program in 2015.
For more information about the 2016 winners, visit www.epa.gov/watersense.