International events like World Water Day provide a great opportunity to reflect on our corporate sustainability goals.  While companies are laudably doing the right thing when it comes to water conservation – low flush toilets, auto-shut nozzles, or landscaping with native plants – the water savings of these initiatives can actually be quite low compared to other options. These are great tactics to lower overall water use but are usually options to look to once all other water saving resources have been exhausted.

Are You Sure You’re Keeping Current?

Sustainability, operations and even finance teams can benefit from keeping their finger on the pulse of the water industry. Time and time again we see new clients under the assumption they’ve implemented the latest and greatest but we soon find room for water savings improvement. It’s no longer acceptable to rely on the same old water savings playbooks that are prescribed by water industry goliaths. If you aren’t adamant on staying current, how can you expect to improve?

Get to Your Water Savings Goals Comfortably

Water savings orders of magnitude greater can be achieved when looking for improvements in water purification.  This is where the large volumes of water are being used and sadly, wasted. These are processes that use water in manufacturing and in heating and cooling. Every improvement in water recovery could mean tens of thousands – even millions – of gallons saved, getting you comfortably to your sustainability goals.

Beer – A Tasty Case Study

To help put this in perspective, let’s consider a hypothetical example based on one of my favorite products: beer.  A local success story around here is the Boston Beer Company.  They are not a customer of ours and have already established robust sustainability initiatives.  The following calculation is based on publicly available numbers and is done to illustrate magnitudes of return.  According to the company’s 2016 annual report, they shipped a total volume of 4,019,000 barrels for 2016 with a total of 1505 employees. 

If the company were to invest in low flush toilets, they could potentially save approximately 360,000 gallons per year.  This assumes a savings of 0.32 gallons/flush for all employees working a standard work week at an average 3 flushes per day.

In comparison, increasing the recovery rate of the water purification systems used in brewing their beer would save approximately 210 million gallons per year – more than 580 times that saved by low flushing toilets.   This assumes that each barrel of beer requires 248 gallons of water, the use of a traditional reverse osmosis system at a 75% recovery rate in production of the brewing product water, and a commercially available Closed Circuit Reverse Osmosis system increasing recovery to 95%.  In addition, the financial implications of an average combine water tariff of $15.50/kGal in the USA as reported in the 2017 GWI Global Water Survey, means that same water savings pays back roughly $3.25M annually in operational expense to the company’s bottom line.

All of the Above

Sustainability is a journey, not a destination.  Technology is constantly evolving providing new opportunities for savings.  In a perfect world, industrial water users would implement all available water saving strategies.  DesaliTec™’s mission is to help save the world’s water and we believe that all changes – both small and large – are important and worth implementation.  By challenging the status quo, we believe industrial water users can easily and quickly have a positive impact on the environment and their bottom line.   In addition to the materially financial savings in operations, Closed Circuit Reverse Osmosis enables industrial water users to keep more of water they need while throwing less down the drain, leaving far more for everyone’s tap.  We can all drink to that!