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ROUND TABLE REVIEW: SOLUTIONS FOR WATER & ENERGY SAVING IN COMMERCIAL ENVIRONMENTS
WATERTIGHT CREDENTIALS The round table featured a strong lineup of water companies, consultants, and product manufacturers to provide real-world ideas for improving commercial water effi ciency
accountability; effectively no-one was in charge of driving the agenda: “I have no idea who leads water in the UK – everywhere else in the world, it is properly owned by someone.” Tucker also touched on the lack of incentives, where mandatory water effi ciency measures were needed to drive change, from the seemingly mundane like fi xing leaky toilets and urinals to linking water saving to carbon saving targets. Alongside rigorous standards, practical case studies were needed to bring widespread adoption Currently, said George Warren from Anglian Water, the biggest driver he was seeing was in fact commercial clients such as manufacturing operations requesting increased water supply to their sites. However, this was in turn making them look at consumption in other areas of sites to offset the increase: “when they are increasing their demand and there is no other water, we help them to look at reducing their consumption to free up capacity.” Warren said that despite water companies not having a legal obligation to guarantee supply to commercial sites in the way they do for domestic properties, commercial clients with their own boreholes are falling foul of the Environment Agency’s “massive clampdown” on abstraction licenses, and they are ”turning to water companies for help.”
Consultant Edward Barnes gave the example of water constraints in Sussex North region, which was seeing requirements for “water neutrality” on new domestic and non-domestic developments, meaning that authorities “have no option but to drive an aggressive programme of water effi ciency.” The resulting ‘water credits’ which enable developers to progress schemes have led to something of a “Wild West around the value; they are selling for incredible sums of money,” said Barnes. Tucker vociferously dismissed the water credits scheme, saying
that Thames Water’s advice to Government was to “scrap it now, it will never work properly.” He asserted; “we are delivering water neutrality now, it’s so simple if you just put things in place properly.” George Warren made the point that the ‘missing link’ in the discussion was potentially the water ‘retailers’ who hold
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a disproportionate amount of infl uence, as brokers between the water companies and customers. He warned they weren’t directly incentivised to save because of the ‘block tariff’ system.
The water label – a missed opportunity Andrew Tucker asked what ‘sticks’ existed for industry to produce and install water saving solutions, in the absence of Government regulations in this area, and delegates said that the promised national mandatory label would be a crucial driver. “It will be the same as the energy label from the Energy Saving Trust” (which was given to the top 5% performing products in every energy category. He added that this EU’s mandatory energy label led to a situation
where “everything became more effi cient,” to the extent that the “whole market was now in that top 5% category.” He said that this needed to happen with water and showers: “we may not need to set minimum or maximum standards; the label might just be the thing that you will be specifying in Building Regs.” Tucker concluded: “Then you can focus on the re-use stuff which is much more diffi cult and needs work.”
Despite some controversy around the fl ow limits set for the original unifi ed water label, Tom Reynolds said that he believed that the Government was “overcomplicating the issue, because a water label already exists.” He asserted that the industry “could just hit the ground running, if it was made mandatory,” but Tucker said “that ship has sailed,” calling it a “missed opportunity.” Reynolds also cautioned that capping performance on showers was risky, because while “all the major brands will comply, players on Temu, Amazon and own branded labels won’t necessarily comply.” Other delegates also alluded to shower head products coming into the UK from the far east which had not been CE Marked. However, Andrew Tucker pushed back saying that in a wider review of failed products and parts by Thames Water, only 8% of problem products recorded were “in that category,” but he also accepted qualifi cations from others that the failures were more of a problem in shower heads.
ADF MAY 2025
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