Feature Article: Sustainable Water Management 

Although they often play second fiddle to CO2 issues in the realm of environmental sustainability, water issues are becoming increasingly critical everywhere. Impacts on water can arise from each or all of four aspects of business activity:  

• commercial and industrial land and buildings
• employees' workplace activities and business travel
• processes such as procurement, manufacturing operations and logistics, and 
• the company's products themselves.  

Companies should be looking at some or all of these issues now, as water becomes and increasingly problematic commodity around the world. 

First, one has to make the distinction between direct and indirect water issues: water issues in land, buildings and operations are often directly resulting from your company's activities, while water issues in the supply chain are usually an indirect consequence of the related activity.  For example, the use of water in metal-cutting processes is direct consequence of an operational process (and under the company's control), while procurement of agricultural commodities (already outside the company's control) indirectly involves the procurement of water. Operational managers will usually have fairly direct access to data and clearer paths to control the water agenda. Supply chain managers can only "get to" the water issue example above through the top-level commodity issue. It's a subtle, but important, point.

Second, business-related water issues involve both quality and quantity impacts. Manufacturing process water runoff may be contaminated, causing downstream quality issues. Therefore, operational managers need skills and strategies around both the existence of the runoff (i.e., can we lower the amount of wastewater?) and its contents (i.e., can we do a better job at removing contaminants before the water leaves our facilities?). In agriculture, irrigation and fertilizer use are often highly correlated in food production. Therefore, there are issues of how much water is used/wasted and how much fertilizer run off ends up in the water. In the context of procuring agricultural commodities, supply chain managers need to develop strategies to deal with both the quantity and quality issues of water management.

Finally, because water is often a "free" commodity, it is often challenging to develop accurate metrics about water management. Internal business units and many suppliers will not have information about water use, much less the efficiency of that use. Water quality data is likewise scarce at a granular level (higher-level data isn't always useful at pinpointing where quality issues arise). Operational and supply chain managers will have to work creatively with other stakeholders to set goals, track progress and make continuous improvements. It's by no means impossible, but often challenging.

Despite this challenge, progress is very possible. There are analytical and process-improvement models out there in both the operational and supply chain spheres that can be applied to get a handle on water issues. Subject matter experts and others have begun to develop a set of best practices around business-related water management. And more companies are creating and joining industry-based consortia. 

Below, we present a few ideas to start you on your journey. Water -- some call it "tomorrow's CO2." We think it should be one focus of today.