- State officials say the Great Salt Lake’s long-term decline is driven primarily by water overconsumption, not short-term dry or warm years.
- Agriculture uses about 75% of Utah’s water, while most indoor residential water is recycled back into the lake through the state’s closed system.
- Panelists urged media to temper claims about toxic dust, saying current monitoring shows no direct evidence of rising arsenic levels in nearby communities.
“If you want to save the planet, take shorter showers.” That’s been the mantra taught to elementary and middle school children across the country for decades. But new data from the Great Salt Lake Strike Team tells a different story, where residential, indoor water use is not the greatest threat to the lake.
In recent years, Utah’s lawmakers have been fighting to prevent the state’s largest lake, the Great Salt Lake, from withering away, mirroring efforts by lawmakers around the world who are fighting the same problems.
For a long time, conservationists have pointed at increasing global temperatures as the main culprit in this phenomenon, but Utah officials say other factors are also to blame.
The Great Salt Lake is not declining because of dry and warm years, said Hannah Freeze, the deputy Great Salt Lake commissioner, during a panel discussion at the Utah Capitol on Tuesday night.
“There are wet and dry years — they cause short-term fluctuations — but the long-term decline of the lake is in our hands, and it’s being caused by the overconsumption of water,” she said.
Overconsumption is the nemesis of many bodies of water worldwide. It’s the reason the Colorado River’s height has shrunk over the past decades, according to a study published by Nature in 2024.
What is eating up most of Utah’s water?
In Utah, 75% of the state’s water supply is used for agriculture, and the remaining quarter is consumed by municipal and industrial use.
Utah residents account for more than two-thirds of the state’s municipal and industrial water use, with the largest section going to outdoor use, including watering lawns and gardens, according to Utah State University.
However, as Utah’s population grows, its water-use ratio is shifting. “As we’re losing agricultural land to development, the water used for agricultural production is decreasing,” and residential water use is growing, Freeze said.
But Utah has developed extremely efficient ways of recycling all water used indoors. Because of these systems, former Rep. Tim Hawkes, R-Centerville, said, “It’s no exaggeration to say that Utah could grow forever.”
Utah has a closed water system where water in the north region of the state recycles through the Great Salt Lake. Ninety-two percent of indoor use eventually ends up back in the lake, Cutler said.
Panelists urged the media to stop fear mongering about dust
In the last year, Utah started building a dust monitoring network that would help the state know if there are harmful materials like arsenic being pulled off the newly exposed lakebed. So far, they’ve built six, and they’re planning on building 11 more.
From the data that’s already been collected, there’s no “direct evidence that arsenic from the lake is increasing the arsenic concentrations in the surrounding communities,” Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, previously told the Deseret News.
Tim Davis, the executive director of Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality, added that there’s been a lot of exaggeration surrounding the dust and what it could do to Utahns.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about that dust, and there’s a lot of hyperbole around that dust about what’s in it,” he said.