With the onset of the hottest days in the year, Sofiyska Voda, operated by Veolia, launched an initiative for offering water without packaging (tap water) to the customers in the Sofia restaurants. The aim is to encourage restaurants to offer and also customers to order, respectively, tap water, as it’s the practice in many European capitals and cities.
Drinking water in Sofia ranks among the top in Europe in terms of quality. It has a neutral pH, around 7.2, due to its high-mountain origin, mainly from snowmelt. The water is soft and without a specific taste and smell, completely appropriate for a daily use by people of all ages.
With the Water Without Packaging campaign, Sofiyska Voda helps spreading the awareness about the water quality in Sofia, and also to encourage people to limit the use of plastic bottles.
Wishing to make water accessible everywhere, Sofiyska Voda found partners and like-minded people as Stolicha H20, on whose digital map we can already now find which restaurants in Sofia offer tap water.
In addition to restaurants, shops and even office buildings have shown interest in the compain. Each of these places is marked with a sticker indicating that tap water is offered at that location too. There is a QR code on the sticker leading to detailed information about the quality of tap water in the metropolitan city, including information on the water content and the laboratory tests done in all areas of the city.
Tap water in Sofia comes from the the Rila Mountain and the Iskar and Beli Iskar dams. In 2021 alone, the laboratory of Sofiyska Voda took over 9,000 samples along the whole route to the end customer and had carried over 150,000 analyses. The annual results show that the water of Sofia fully meets and even exceeds the state regulatory requirements for drinking water quality.