One thing’s for certain when it comes to water use: the less your company needs, the better off it’ll be.

Sure, saving water is a green thing to do, but there are more powerful reasons driving business interest in water conservation. For starters, EPA’s certainly not going to relax any water quality standard, and it’s even warning that it will ramp up enforcement of Clean Water Act rules (click here).

But even more powerful is the prospect of trying to operate without access to enough water, especially in states with drought problems, such as Arizona, California, Georgia and Texas where most expect population density to expand rapidly.

How do you get started on reassessing your water usage and target ways to reduce water needs? Siemens Water Technology offers a basic five-step strategy to get started:

1. Audit ALL of your water usage, from intake to discharge, not just your major production processes. Include utility water, irrigation, boiler feed water and wash water.
2. Treat water as a valuable resource because it is costly, especially if you have to pre-treat your water to clean it up enough to use in your production processes.
3. Reuse and recycle water used during manufacturing. This doesn’t mean you have to adopt a zero-discharge policy or reuse 100% of all of your discharged water. Look for the simple ways to reuse water and build from there. Small steps can yield big returns without capital investments.
4. Reduce wastewater discharges. The regulatory costs needed to meet Clean Water Act regulations won’t be going away, so any time you can reduce waste, you’re cutting permitting and disposal costs.
5. Treat water usage as an energy-intensive activity, because it is. Energy bills can account for nearly 30% of water treatment costs, especially for wastewater treatment plants.

Some companies who’ve followed Siemen’s advice and chopped their water usage include:

• A pharmaceutical company that now recovers over 52 million gallons of water a year (check here).
• Northeast Hot Fill Co-op, Inc., a water bottling company that increased its water recovery rate from 75% to over 90%, (click here), and
• a Chrysler plant in Mexico that now reclaims more than 100,000 gallons of water a day (click here).

Tags: Chrysler, Northeast hot Fill Co-op, recycling, Siemens, water conservation, water reuse