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How a Company Can Understand and Reduce Water Consumption

By Daniel Stouffer

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 12Aug2010 Word count: 528 Viewed: 229 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

A smart company can take three steps to reduce water consumption, while also protecting its position in the marketplace, assessing risks and embracing sustainability. Firstly, the company needs to assess its baseline, take stock of its water inventory and identify its footprint. Secondly, it must fully understand its risk exposure and thirdly it must design and implement a plan.

The greenhouse gas protocol tells us that there are different categories of carbon emissions. We understand that emissions can be produced in different ways -- directly when energy is produced, indirectly when it is consumed and upstream or downstream of a typical production facility. We can refer to this analogy when trying to reduce water consumption, by ensuring that we understand how water can be used in the supply chain and in disposal efforts.

A smart company can take three steps to reduce water consumption, while also protecting its position in the marketplace, assessing risks and embracing sustainability. Firstly, the company needs to assess its baseline, take stock of its water inventory and identify its footprint. Secondly, it must fully understand its risk exposure and thirdly it must design and implement a plan.

When composing the water footprint, understand how the resource may be used to make available raw materials or goods which are introduced to the production line by suppliers. This could be in the "work in progress" production phase or during transportation and the company needs to take responsibility for the fact that this happens. While it may well be beyond the borders of the organization, the fact is that the company's demand for the supplier's product is the cause of this water usage.

Fundamentally, in the production stage, water used should be from a renewable source, where at all possible. Water is likely to be as volatile a political subject as carbon emissions in the future. Consider how consumers and stakeholders will became increasingly aware that we are all seeking to procure it from the same resource.

Remember that water can become an issue when it is used for an industrial or commercial purpose. Questions will govern its efficient use, but it can also be a potentially inflammatory issue after the fact as well. Water discharge or runoff can become a pollution concerns and every effort should be made to recycle.

When a company assesses its water related risks, it will likely see an additional urgency to reduce water consumption wherever possible. So many factors can combine to place a premium on water. Local ground conditions, for example, or weather conditions that cause temporary drought. Consider how market conditions could cause energy fluctuations and a corresponding demand for water generated power and so on.

Water related risks can change significantly depending on the geographical location of a company facility. Therefore, for distributed organizations, an assessment of such risks must take in to account regional disparities, local political positions and attitudes.

The corporate approach must be modified to reduce water consumption from a global perspective. Essentially, we have not increased our water efficiency over the last couple of decades, choosing to place most emphasis on energy efficiency and carbon emissions. Sustainability is multifaceted and cannot be polarized.

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