Buyers Guide 2021

Focus on: Water & Waste Management Energy, the Environment & Water washdowns and other services. The savings alone would soon more than justify any investment in getting you to that point but it doesn’t end there. It’s a big potential PR win, you find it easier to comply with intake and discharge regulations, your supply and, therefore, your production is more secure, you reduce your effluent stream, and you’re helping safeguard the nation from a looming water security crisis. Changing attitudes Such a broad set of benefits begs a question – why aren’t all UK manufacturing businesses taking serious steps to conserve water already, when they are well ahead of us in a number of other countries? Elsewhere, there are places that are much more water-stressed and, as a result, they are much more conscious of how precious a resource water really is. In parts of Africa and India, for example, many manufacturers treat their wastewater and inject it back into the ground in a process known as ‘managed aquifer recharge’. Instead of depleting local water tables and damaging local harvests, they bank the water to ensure the farmer down the road using a borehole has everything he needs to irrigate his crops. In Britain, however, where we usually experience rain all year round, we seem to think water is free and unlimited. It just falls out of the sky, so, if we pour our wastewater down the drain, who cares? It’s no longer our problem. Wastewater isn’t technically an externality, as companies bear costs in dealing with it, but they don’t seem to want the hassle of treating it. So, I’d argue, we need a change in mindset, whereby we understand that water is scarce and start treating it that way. The benefits to us all of doing so are plain to see. Cyclical thinking If a manufacturer is committed to water conservation and to securing the cost, regulatory and reputational wins I described earlier, the first step is to engage an expert partner to conduct a water audit that has two parts. First, they come in and establish how much is being used, whether it’s being used effectively and to identify any opportunities to reduce consumption. And second, they then determine how you can integrate any further processes that enable you to recover and reuse a significant proportion of the water you do use. While we’re not restricted by law in this country and there’s no technical reason it cannot be perfectly safe, the guidance is that you shouldn’t reuse recovered water in food production – imagine the headlines if a soft drink manufacturer, say, was revealed to be using wastewater to make their fizzy pop. But there are plenty of other uses wastewater can be put to, including putting it through an anaerobic digester to clean it up and to harvest the biogas by-product to feed back into your boilers and other processes for further energy- saving benefits. That way, you begin to create a cycle of reuse and of benefit. And that’s how we need to change our thought process about water. It is not a throughput. It is as integral to our operations as it is to the future of humanity. Water is everything. As the central ingredient in the cycle of life, it sustains us in every way, so we should treat it with more care. And, if we do, we can all be winners in the end. *Ian Hart is business development director at adi Projects, a division of the multidisciplinary engineering company, adi Group Talking Industry CALL FOR FUTURE PANELISTS for our online panel discussions Contact us at Plant & Works Engineering for more information: *HRUJLH 7XUQHU 01732 371084 georgie.turner@dfamedia.co.uk | Damien Oxlee 01732 370342 damien.oxlee@dfamedia.co.uk