SPU and Seattle Shine During the FIFA World Cup

This year’s FIFA World Cup put a global spotlight on Seattle, with the city receiving honors as the best match venue. Seattle Public Utilities was there for every moment to ensure our customers and the 3 million soccer fans who visited experienced a clean city with great water.

Among the highlights:

Clean City crews removed 294,575 pounds of debris.
Selected events and watch parties used reusable dishware, preventing the overall use of 20,000 single-use items overall.
SPU’s multilingual digital campaign about “Let’s Play generated more than 3.2 million impressions.
Three multilingual ads focused on “Let’s Play… Without Waste,” “Our Tap Water is Better than Bottled,” and “Help Us Find It and Fix It” reached more than 700,000 people and generated more than 3.2 million impressions, driving more than 3,000 visits to our “Clean City, Great Water. Summer 2026” web page.

SPU welcomed fans to city—and asked them to help us keep our city and waters clean. We built on our innovative and responsive year-round water and waste services to support FIFA World Cup operations.

In partnership with the Port of Seattle and others, we promoted a regionwide “Let’s Play Campaign” that wrapped bins and helped visitors reuse, recycle, compost, and properly dispose of waste. To further reduce waste, we partnered with local organizations to rescue food and upcycle suits and banners.

Our crews helped ensure residents, business and visitors could enjoy our vibrant city. They removed 273,075 pounds of debris and 21,500 pounds of recycling, stayed read to quickly respond to infrastructure issues, and maintained seven very popular drinking water bottle refill stations.

At FIFA World Cup Watch parties, we supported the use of reusable dishware (boasting a return rate of more than 94% at Park events ats and preventing the use of 20,000 single-use items), we built terrariums with kids to teach them about the water cycle, coached more than 1,000 people to defend their drains like a goalie by keeping compost out.

Community partnerships are essential to SPU’s work. Special thanks to all the community, business and government partners made this work possible, including: