Protecting Drinking Water Inside the Building

Key Takeaways: 

• Water quality doesn't stop at the municipal supply—building owners and facility teams play a critical role in maintaining safe drinking water through proactive monitoring, maintenance and water management practices.
• Building plumbing systems can introduce contaminants or create conditions that degrade water quality, making routine assessment and proper system design essential for protecting occupant health.
• Frameworks like the WELL Building Standard encourage facilities to go beyond regulatory compliance by implementing ongoing water quality monitoring, stewardship and performance verification to build long-term confidence in drinking water.

Municipal water utilities work hard to deliver safe drinking water, but that's only part of the journey. Once water enters a building, its quality can be influenced by everything from plumbing materials and system design to ongoing operations and maintenance. That's why proactive water management has become an essential responsibility for today's building owners and facility teams. 

Clean drinking water is one of the greatest public health achievements of the past century. Yet it's also something we often take for granted — until a drought, contamination event or plumbing issue reminds us how quickly confidence in our water can be shaken. 

Providing potable water is a complex, multi-stage process that begins at the source, continues through treatment and distribution and ends at the tap. While public water systems reliably deliver safe drinking water in many communities, water can still pick up contaminants along the way — from aging infrastructure in the distribution system to corrosion within a building's own plumbing, introducing byproducts such as lead and copper. 

The WELL Building Standard, a globally adopted framework for advancing health in the built environment, recognizes that protecting drinking water requires more than meeting municipal standards. It encourages building owners and operators to proactively manage water quality through responsible stewardship, routine monitoring and third-party performance verification. Together, these practices help protect occupant health while building long-term confidence in a building's water system. 

Why buildings matter 

In the United States, water quality is regulated by the EPA through the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and state regulations. These frameworks enforce thresholds for a broad range of chemical and microbiological contaminants, also establishing protocols for water treatment and quality monitoring. While our drinking water systems are generally properly and actively maintained, we still need to keep a close eye on water quality because of the following: 

• Most water quality regulations (except for lead and copper) are not enforceable at the tap. They cover water treatment and distribution into the streets, but distribution from the street to buildings and even buildings themselves can disrupt water quality if not properly designed and/or maintained. 
• Even in well maintained public water systems, disruptions caused by nature  such as hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes or by humans with nearby construction may not be discovered and/or addressed on a timely basis. 
• Science often advances faster than regulation. Emerging contaminants such as microplastics and PFAS, often referred to as "forever chemicals", are a reminder that policy can take years to catch up with evolving evidence. For facility managers, that means waiting for regulation isn't a water management strategy. 

Although the quality of incoming municipal water is largely outside a building's control, what happens next is not. Building owners can monitor water quality within their own systems and, when appropriate, use treatment technologies to address contaminants of concern, respond to disruptions or improve the drinking experience. 

Managing water inside the building 

Regardless of how safe your municipal water supply might be when it enters buildings, facilities have the potential to make water not suitable for drinking. Water interacts with pipes and fittings and is never sterile, yet this doesn’t mean that it’s unsafe to drink. However, these reactions can make water less suitable for drinking.  

For instance, poorly maintained pipes may corrode and leach byproducts into the water. In addition, chlorine that is added in the water treatment plant to keep pathogens from growing loses some of its power as the water sits in the pipes for too long (usually a few days but can be less at higher temperatures). Buildings where pipes and fixtures are not kept up or having sections where water doesn’t move (or moves very slowly) may foster these corrosion and chlorine decay processes and compromise water safety.  

This is why it is important to assess the water throughout a building: it is the way to uncover design, operations or maintenance issues before they escalate into major water quality concerns that are costly and can potentially cause harm to human health. In other words, a building's plumbing system is part of its water treatment system — and it needs to be managed accordingly. 

Rodolfo Perez, Ph.D., is Vice President of Standard Development and Water and Materials Concept Lead at the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), where he leads the development of the Water and Materials concepts in the WELL Building Standard. Previously, he worked at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, specializing in drinking water quality, Legionella surveillance and environmental health. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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