Water Quality Advocacy
Water Resilience, Purification & Blue Battery Infrastructure
GreenDeck Climate Commons is a Seattle-based environmental initiative dedicated to building healthier, more climate-resilient communities through green stormwater infrastructure, water purification, renewable energy, and innovative public-space design.
Our mission reaches across Seattle—from dense urban neighborhoods and transportation corridors to residential communities, schools, parks, commercial properties, and historically underserved areas. We believe clean water, climate resilience, renewable energy, and healthy public spaces should be accessible to every community.
One of GreenDeck Climate Commons’ primary goals is to transform stormwater from a liability into a valuable community resource. Seattle receives significant annual rainfall, yet much of that water is directed from rooftops, streets, parking areas, and other impervious surfaces into drainage systems where it can contribute to flooding, erosion, combined sewer overflows, and pollution entering local waterways and Puget Sound.
GreenDeck Climate Commons seeks to intercept, clean, store, and reuse that water closer to where it falls.
Purification Systems
GreenDeck Climate Commons supports the integration of modular water purification systems with rain gardens, cisterns, bioswales, green infrastructure, and rainwater-harvesting systems throughout Seattle.
These systems can use multiple treatment stages—including sediment filtration, activated carbon, biological filtration, and other treatment technologies—to improve captured water quality before it is reused for appropriate non-potable applications such as irrigation, landscape maintenance, urban agriculture, cleaning, and other community uses.
With appropriate engineering, treatment, monitoring, and regulatory approval, advanced purification systems may also create opportunities for emergency or community water resilience.
Instead of allowing thousands of gallons of rainfall to immediately enter storm drains, GreenDeck systems can help retain water locally, reduce stormwater volumes, protect infrastructure, support vegetation, and create a decentralized reserve of water throughout the city.
The Blue Battery
A central GreenDeck Climate Commons concept is the Blue Battery—a distributed water-and-energy resilience system designed to capture rainfall, store it, clean it, and use renewable energy to move and manage that water.
A Blue Battery can combine:
Rainwater collection from roofs and impervious surfaces
Cistern or modular water storage
Green stormwater infrastructure
Multi-stage water filtration and purification
Solar-powered pumping
Smart sensors and water-level monitoring
Controlled irrigation or infiltration
Public or maintenance water-access points where appropriate
Renewable-energy components capable of supporting pumps, sensors, lighting, and other low-energy infrastructure
The idea is simple: capture water when Seattle has too much of it and make that water available when communities and landscapes need it.
Much like an electrical battery stores energy for later use, the Blue Battery stores rainfall as a usable resource. When paired with solar generation, filtration, and intelligent controls, these systems can become small-scale pieces of neighborhood climate infrastructure.
A Network Across Seattle
The greatest potential comes from connecting many systems together.
Imagine Blue Batteries and purification systems installed at schools, affordable housing developments, community centers, parks, commercial buildings, transportation corridors, underpasses, public facilities, and private properties throughout Seattle.
Individually, each installation can manage stormwater and support local landscapes. Collectively, they could create a distributed network that reduces runoff, conserves potable water, supports urban vegetation, improves climate resilience, and helps protect Seattle's waterways.
This decentralized approach matters as Seattle prepares for heavier rainfall events, summer drought conditions, urban heat, aging infrastructure, and continued population growth.
GreenDeck Climate Commons believes climate infrastructure should do more than solve one problem at a time. A single installation can manage stormwater, generate renewable energy, support vegetation, improve public space, provide educational opportunities, and strengthen community resilience.
Our goal is to demonstrate how Seattle can begin treating water, energy, green infrastructure, and public space as one interconnected system.
Through partnerships with communities, utilities, agencies, nonprofits, schools, contractors, engineers, and property owners, GreenDeck Climate Commons aims to develop replicable projects that can expand throughout Seattle and eventually serve as a model for other communities.
Every roof can become a watershed.
Every cistern can become a reservoir.
Every rain garden can become treatment infrastructure.
And every Blue Battery can become part of a larger network of climate resilience.
