WATER EFFICIENCY


balance. When we started doing it, I had 140% or even 150% water balance sometimes. Because the cost of the water is not that high, it just goes under the carpet. Doing the water balance exercise opens people’s eyes in a big way.


Paul Martin: It is something of a mindset change for our business. The commercial part is very important; it is a key driver. But it is about everyone’s objectives. It is about thinking about how you do things differently.


Ian Walsh: I agree. Starting off with the low- cost stuff and the behavioural and cultural issues is the right way to go. The opportunities to do sizeable capital investment are there. But the lion’s share of projects, like a water recycling and recovery plant, have been invested in because of the cost of effluent discharge, not because of the cost of the resource in the first place. In the UK, you are typically looking at a three to one ratio between what you are paying to get rid of the stuff versus what you are paying for it to come in through the front door. The biggest driver in the carbon agenda, despite what everybody likes to think about the morals of climate change, has been the price of energy. Justifying spending money on projects which


reduce water use, unless you can show a very good saving based on your effluent bill, three-, four- or five-year payback periods are not attractive to boards unless they are heavily converted to the ethical position.


Inder Poonaji: Water is a basic human right. And that is the key value that drives a lot of our thinking. The other thing is that water has no boundaries. At Nestlé, there are three key things that we value in our shared sustainability programme: nutrition, water and rural development. Water is a key ingredient – that must be respected and valued.


Jens Eiken: For us, it is about increasing awareness about water as a really precious component. We’ve created a nationwide employee communications programme to educate our staff about the importance of improving water efficiency and maintaining quality. We’re rolling this out across our global business units.


David Ion: When we started looking at our carbon footprint, we were looking for an indicator that we could make available to our workforce and a lot of the energy demands are outside of their control. But water has a very high visibility and we went for a lot of point-of-use metering, which is a really key way of saying to someone,


‘Today, you used 2.5m3, how can you get that down?’They know what they do. They know where their waste is.


Simon Parsons: For those of you who value water highly because it is going into your products, water is obviously a key issue. But what about you, Alison? You come from a very different sector.


Alison Shenton: Yes. We do not want a lot of it in the product, but we use a lot of it to make the product – cement. Traditionally, we extracted water from the river, but we wanted to reduce the stress on the local river. So we worked-out a shale quarry to create a lake that now provides all the water for the works. Now, we don’t abstract from the river at all. It has saved us a huge amount of money, a massive amount of energy and it is a recirculating system, so the water from the lake goes through the works and is used for cooling. But we still have to understand where we are using water and driving people to use less.


Simon Parsons: What do you think is likely to be the situation five or ten years down the line


“Water is a basic human right. And that is the key value that drives a lot of our thinking. The other thing is that water has no boundaries”


in terms of how water is going to become more and more important for your business?


Martin Seal: It is the risk element that Richard talked about. If you are really going to ask your business to look at the risk that sits within your operating sites and the supply chain on water, it kicks out some quite interesting things. Clearly you need to look at where your


potatoes are being grown and establish the availability of water within those locations. You can then start to look at the physical supply chain risks and raise that risk into a financial. All of a sudden it becomes quite a big number with which to sit down with senior management. In 2007, there was a major flood in the UK and we lost a certain amount of our potato crops. At the same time, there was a major drought in southern Europe, so we actually had a crazy situation where we could not get the potatoes out of the ground in the UK because it was too wet and in Europe, we could not get them out because the ground was too hot. That


cost PepsiCo about US$10M. So there is an ability to move the debate on from saving money by reducing usage to looking at risk.


Ian Walsh: Comments have been made about carbon dominating the agenda and water being left out. But we are in danger of doing exactly the same thing with water as we have been doing with carbon – looking at water with our blinkers on.


Also, we’ve talked a lot about water use and


water efficiency. But the most important word in the water agenda is impact. In the carbon debate, it is a global phenomenon and we revert all fuels back to carbon equivalent. With gas it is


all about CO2e. But we don’t have H2Oe. Should we focus all of our efforts on making things absolutely dandy in the UK? Or should we focus our efforts on Africa and India and Asia Pacific? I know what the answer is, but it’s about how you get that message across and how you quantify the risks when there are no agreed measures for calculating the impact.


Simon Parsons: Is it about accepting responsibility for water use in your supply chain?


Richard Harpin: I have just come back from a round table meeting of the Alliance forWater Stewardship in Brussels, which is trying to set standards for water stewardship. It is difficult because different places around the world have different regulations and different cultural needs. There are standards at the moment in Australia and in Europe for water stewardship, but it’s a voluntary thing. In Europe, we have the Water Framework


Directive as an underlying regulation, which affects where we use water. But they have now all set themselves the task that in three years’ time, they want to produce water stewardship standards that companies and utilities can sign up to and prove they are engaged in good practice. It’s a fantastic opportunity, but I am worried that it is a very difficult thing to achieve.


Mark Lovett: We have saved about 40% of our water usage and we did it to save money and to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. But should we do more? The next step is innovation and investment and is it worth us doing that investment from a financial point of view? Would we be better spending our limited sustainability budget on something else? I could find tonnes and tonnes of carbon savings from minimal investment elsewhere. We are in Wiltshire, which is not short of water. I worry more about what our competitors are doing.


Richard Harpin: The first thing I would be September 2010 Water & Wastewater Treatment 37


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