Nov 66 min read

An A-Z of Sustainability: W is for Water

Water accounts for over 70% of the earth’s surface (maybe our planet should be called Water not Earth!) but of course most of this is salt water in the oceans. Fresh water accounts for only 3% of the water on earth and it’s this that we’ll be focusing mainly on in this week’s article.

When it comes to company sustainability there are two distinct aspects to consider regarding water – how much you are using and what you are putting into the water system. In both cases location is critical. We are used to hearing something along the lines of “1kg of carbon emissions in London has the same effect as 1 kg of emissions in Beijing”, because we share one atmosphere on a global scale. With water it really is much more about the specific locations. Yes, these are all interconnected into one global water system, but the impacts are really felt in what are often called the local “water basin” – i.e. the interconnected rivers impacted by your operations.

Water discharge

We’ll start with the risks associated with what you are putting into the water system. In many industries this is maybe no more than the wastewater associated with cleaning, washing and the toilets which ends up in the municipal water treatment system. But for manufacturing or agriculture this is going to be something you’ll need to be much more aware of. Releases to watercourses are highly regulated in developed economies and in a manufacturing organisation they are often overseen by HSE teams. Even here though it is worth investigating what standards you apply globally – are you just working to local standards (in which case what are you doing in less regulated territories?), or do you apply the best standard in a common way across the globe? Either way, you should be aware of what you are putting into water and know what the consequences are. Although I said that this article will focus mainly on fresh water, discharges to sea should also be part of your focus here. And really this should extend beyond your own operations to your suppliers? There are some industrial processes that are deliberately situated by seas or rivers so that they can release discharges to these water bodies.

The risk here is of course reputational. In the UK, the water industry has, quite rightly, received a huge amount of bad press for the state of the UK’s waterways, and the topic is therefore very high in the public consciousness. As a result, any pollution incident in rivers or seas gets even more attention. If you are discharging to the local water basin you need to consider not just what is happening in normal situations, but what could happen in extreme weather events. What happens if there is torrential rain on your sites? Can the drainage cope, is there an increased risk of run-off or could this lead to extra contamination? What extra precautions might be needed if previously 1 in 100-year events start to become more like 1 in 10-year events?

How you judge the risks associated with what you are discharging to rivers and the sea will depend on what it is, how much there is, the effects it can cause and where it is. So, a blanket risk assessment without locational context should be avoided. Making use of tools such as WWF’s Water Risk Filter or WRI’s Aquaduct Risk Atlas can help here, with the latter enabling you to select distinct aspects of water risk if you want to drill down.

Water use

The other part of the equation is how much water you are actually using. Again, location will be a key factor in how much of a priority this will be in your plans. It will also depend on what you are using water for. An office using water just for washing, toilets and watering the plants is going to have a completely different risk profile to a factory that relies on water for generating steam, or as part of an industrial process, or indeed as a raw material in the final product.

Many regions of the world are more water stressed than we realise. The term water stress is used to consider both demand and supply, it is not just about the availability of water. Two places can have the same access to water but if one is the location of a large city and the other is rural, the two will have a different level of water stress. For instance, many people don’t realise that much of the southeast of England rates quite high from a water stress perspective, and indeed it’s estimated that over 30% of Europeans currently live in water stressed areas, a number that is only going to increase.

Managing water

So, the first thing of course is to measure what you are actually using in all your locations, and then you can think of reduction plans. If you have similar types of sites then making comparisons between locations can be useful to highlight outliers. You may need to look at water usage per person or by production quantity to allow for the different sizes of sites, but league tables of sites on these sorts of metrics can throw up some obvious areas for attention and create some competition between sites.

You could look at storing and reusing rainwater in much the same way that people have water butts at home. It could just be for washing equipment or watering the grounds, but in some cases investment in onsite water treatment could be worthwhile to enable the water to be used in your industrial processes too. One of the quick wins that can often be gained is by fixing leaks, either in water pipes or in steam systems. If you have the latter, walking round the site on a cold day will pretty much identify the leaks! Your reduction activities should be prioritised based on location, but it can often be useful to consider if a solution works in one place, whether it should be rolled out everywhere. Again, it is worth planning for possible climate related extreme events – you may be fine in normal situations, but what happens if there is an extended drought situation in a water stressed area? Will your operations still be able to continue, or will you have to swap production to another site? How can you make your sites more resilient to interruptions in water supply? Are there similar issues in your value chain?

Your reduction activities will also likely require behaviour change as much as investment in equipment. At one level this may simply be about reminding people to turn taps off, but at the other extreme you may want to look at your overall manufacturing processes through a water reduction lens – can you do things differently in order to save water? Can you for instance minimise cleaning by scheduling things in a different order or can you reuse wastewater in some way? Getting people to think in these terms without worrying about other considerations to begin with, can throw up some useful suggestions for change.

External stakeholders are getting more interested in this area too. Certain industries are particularly in focus, for instance anything that has an agricultural supply chain, given the concern about agricultural run-off to rivers in particular. One of the common tools that is used to gain insight is the CDP Water Assessment. Although a voluntary submission, some investors are starting to request companies to fill this in, particularly if they are within industries they consider have high water related risks. This can sometimes lead to difficult conversations, as whilst a whole industry may have a high water footprint, individual companies in certain parts of the industry may not, so there can often be a need to educate stakeholders in why a company may not consider water to be material.

This is another area where you can really benefit from what others have done. Whether it’s mapping your geographic risks, putting together a CDP Water questionnaire, or helping put together a water reduction strategy, CEN Group can help.

About the Author

Chris is a senior strategic leader with over 25 years’ commercial experience including sales, marketing, strategic planning and major business change initiatives at AkzoNobel and ICI. He has a wide knowledge of sustainability and how to integrate this into business having held senior sustainability roles at AkzoNobel for 12 years, including as Global Sustainability Director Decorative Paints and AkzoNobel Planet Possible Programme Manager. Chris is now an independent sustainability consultant and a pension trustee director.