Cleaning up industry’s water worries
With clean water supplies increasingly scarce, Angeli Mehta looks at what industry is doing to reduce its demands
Fresh water is in parlous state. Droughts in South Africa and in Europe in 2018 were a wake-up call to industry. In Cape Town, the city came close to ‘day zero’ with the prospect of taps running dry. ‘We knew it was going to happen, but the fact that it came very quickly and dramatically was unexpected,’ says Kevin Winter, at the Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town. ‘It caused the public to talk about water like they’ve never done before.’ In Europe, major navigation routes on the Rhine were almost impassable, ships carrying chemicals ran aground and water extraction for cooling was restricted. BASF, Evonik, Solvay and Shell Chemical all had to cut production, and the Germany economy took a hit.
Just 3% of the planet’s water is fresh water, and most of it is locked up as ice in the polar regions and glaciers. Sometimes a lot arrives in the wrong place at the wrong time, but globally fresh water it’s becoming increasingly scarce. If we carry on polluting and wasting water as we currently are, then by 2030 global demand for fresh water could outstrip supply by 40%.