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A Covington-based environmental nonprofit has sued Swire Coca-Cola, USA and Western Washington Coca-Cola Bottling, alleging the companies’ Bellevue bottling plant has repeatedly discharged stormwater carrying zinc, copper and other pollutants above permitted limits into a creek that feeds Lake Washington.
Waste Action Project filed the Clean Water Act citizen suit on September 18, 2026, in U.S. District Court in Seattle. The nonprofit is represented by the Seattle firm Smith & Lowney PLLC, which has brought a string of similar citizen suits against industrial stormwater dischargers in Washington state.
What the complaint alleges
The Bellevue facility, at 1150 124th Ave. NE, covers roughly 20 acres, most of it paved or otherwise impervious to rain. According to the complaint, stormwater draining the site flows into Goff Creek, a small tributary that runs into Kelsey Creek, through the Mercer Slough wetland complex, and ultimately into Lake Washington — the same lake that anchors Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Bay and Seattle’s Leschi and Madison Park shorelines on the opposite side.
Waste Action Project alleges the plant’s own required sampling turned up zinc levels exceeding the facility’s Clean Water Act permit benchmark, including exceedances the group says occurred in the first and second quarters of 2026, along with copper, turbidity and pH readings it says also triggered additional permit requirements. The suit further alleges Coca-Cola failed at points to adequately control the pollution, collect and analyze samples on schedule, file reports on time, complete required inspections, or take corrective action once benchmarks were exceeded.
These are allegations in a civil complaint, not a court finding. Swire Coca-Cola has not been found liable, and the case has not gone to trial.
Whose numbers these are
Nearly all of the evidence cited in the lawsuit is drawn from Coca-Cola’s own data. Under its industrial stormwater general permit, the Bellevue plant is required to collect quarterly runoff samples and report the results to the Washington Department of Ecology. It was that self-reported data — not an outside inspection or a whistleblower — that produced the exceedances the complaint cites. Ecology also inspected the facility in March 2025, according to reporting on the case.
What has not happened, as of this filing: neither the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency nor Washington’s Department of Ecology has taken enforcement action against the Bellevue plant over these results. The Clean Water Act allows private citizen suits specifically to fill that gap, when a permit holder’s own reporting shows violations that regulators have not acted on. That is the mechanism Waste Action Project is using here — not a finding that the state or federal agencies did anything wrong, but a structural feature of the law that lets a nonprofit step in where an agency has not.
It is also worth being precise about what a “benchmark” is. Under Washington’s general stormwater permit, exceeding a benchmark does not by itself mean a permit has been violated — it triggers a tiered response of increased monitoring, and eventually a required corrective-action plan, rather than an automatic penalty. That distinction is central to the case: Waste Action Project’s complaint alleges Coca-Cola failed to follow through on the parts of that tiered response the permit requires, which is a different and more specific claim than simply exceeding a number on a lab report.
Why zinc and copper, specifically
Zinc and copper are common in stormwater running off paved industrial sites — they wash off from tires, brake pads, roofing and metal equipment — and Puget Sound-area research has found dissolved copper alone exceeds aquatic-life water quality criteria in a majority of stormwater samples from industrial and commercial sites regionwide. Copper is particularly significant for salmon: at concentrations far too low to be visibly toxic, it can impair a salmon’s sense of smell, which the fish rely on to navigate home to the stream where they hatched and to detect predators.
That matters specifically for this stretch of water. The City of Bellevue’s own annual spawner surveys have documented coho salmon returning to Kelsey Creek, the waterway downstream of Goff Creek named in the complaint, though the city’s monitoring shows coho numbers in the creek have been low since 2015. Kelsey Creek also once supported a kokanee run into the Mercer Slough, documented as far back as 1946, though Ecology and city records describe that run as diminished for decades.
What the company says
Carl Foster, Senior Director of Communications for Swire Coca-Cola, told KIRO Newsradio the company takes the concerns raised about the Bellevue facility “seriously” and said “these matters do not affect employee safety or our beverage production processes.” The company has said it operates what it calls a robust stormwater management program at the site and says it continually looks for ways to improve compliance with environmental requirements.
What Waste Action Project wants
The suit asks the court to declare that Coca-Cola has violated, and continues to violate, the Clean Water Act at the Bellevue site, and to order the company to develop and carry out a stormwater pollution prevention plan that meets permit requirements. It also seeks civil penalties of up to $68,445 per violation, per day — a per-day maximum set by federal law for Clean Water Act violations, not a specific dollar figure the group has calculated for this case.
No hearing date had been set as of this writing. Swire Coca-Cola has not filed a public response to the complaint.
