The core benefits in cost reduction and legislative compliance may be key drivers, but companies would do well to consider other, less apparent ones when assessing the potential of any project.
When deciding on a course of action, it’s worth looking at those benefits that are central to a project and then expand on them. Saving money is clearly paramount, but to be sure this objective is actually achieved, it’s crucial to understand how the charges associated with water, effluent, energy and chemicals are measured.
The source data for this will be the bills for these services and each site should have responsibility for, and the ability to monitor, its own usage through access to meters, delivery notes, the bills themselves and all other relevant data.
If anyone needs convincing as to the value of undertaking a water saving project, there are many case studies to be found on the internet that clearly demonstrate the potential benefits with real-life examples from commercial businesses. They clearly show an average saving of just under 40% of these sites’ water and effluent bills, which equates to sizeable amounts of money, and most omit the savings associated with energy, labour and consumables.
Water is central to a combined utility saving. Key to appreciating the true value of water is an understanding of its in-use cost. To gain this understanding, it’s necessary to appreciate the value added to water as it moves through any site. The component costs, the purchase price, the costs for treatment, pumping, labour, heating, cooling, disposing and polluting are all quantifiable, yet changing, and should be defined by the water manager.
It’s possible to find generic and country specific information relating to the added value of water on the internet, but this information is soon obsolete and may be particularly misleading if the contracted charges for a business are structured in an unusual way. So the best way forward is to take a methodical approach and build up an added value spreadsheet for the water used in a plant.
For example, in the case of the cost of hot, softened water (often used for cleaning specific areas of the plant), the contributing components to be considered include:
Once these costs have been assigned, they should be added up and the cost of hot, soft water at the point of use calculated. Companies can then apply this methodology to treated water, blended water, ultrapure or whatever other type of water is used on site.
Many water saving projects fail once the data has been gathered and assimilated, because a clear implementation strategy hasn’t been developed. It’s crucial that once the overall cost of water has been established, it’s multiplied by the volume of water used at the specific points of use in a plant in order to calculate its actual in-use cost at a given point.
Drawing on this in-use cost figure, companies can then work out the cost per hour, per unit manufactured, per operation, per person or whatever metric or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) they wish, and therefore understand whether further efforts to save water in a particular area are worthwhile. In this way, they will end up with a list of water use areas and costs (comparable using their own KPIs) and start to identify potential water reduction projects.
It’s at this stage that the work needs to be done to assess how much water each project will potentially save – its monetary value as well as the capital and running costs of the project in order to complete a full cost or benefit analysis.
In the UK, one food manufacturer that was considering installing a reverse osmosis plant to treat all the water coming onto its site, conducted a study balancing the savings of reduced water and chemical usage, improved cleaning and enhanced steam boiler function with the costs of installing the plant, its maintenance and consumables. It arrived at an inconclusive conclusion. However, once the increased waste water charges and pre-treatment costs had been taken into consideration, the project was shown to be non-viable.
Getting all the information needed to make effective decisions requires specialist skills that may not necessarily be present on site.
Of course, there are costs associated with such projects, and these include:
Finally, companies should look out for new legislation, changes in charging regimes and new product lines from the standpoint of their impact on the utility bills in order to ensure a proactive rather than a reactive approach to water and utility management.
Alex Milne was Zenith Vale Manager at Zenith International.
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