For many companies, water efficiency is a long-term requirement for staying in business, a big commercial opportunity, or both.
In a world where demand for water is on the road to outstripping supply, many companies are struggling to find the water they need to run their businesses. In 2004, for instance, Pepsi Bottling and Coca-Cola closed down plants in India that local farmers and urban interests believed were competing with them for water. In 2007, a drought forced the US Tennessee Valley Authority to reduce its hydropower generation by nearly a third. Some $300 million in power generation was lost.
Businesses everywhere could face similar challenges during the next few years. A larger global population and growing economies are placing bigger demands on already-depleted water supplies. Agricultural runoff and other forms of pollution are exacerbating the scarcity of water that is clean enough for human and industrial use in some regions, and changes in climate may worsen the problem. Scarcity is raising prices and increasing the level of regulation and competition among stakeholders for access to water. To continue operating, companies in most sectors must learn how to do more with less.
Achieving that goal is an opportunity as well as a necessity. Many of these same companies are developing products and services that can help business customers raise their water productivity. In agriculture, improved irrigation technologies and plant-management techniques are yielding “more crops per drop.” New approaches now rolling out will help oil companies, mines, utilities, beverage companies, technology producers, and others use water more efficiently. Closing the gap between supply and demand by deploying water productivity improvements across regions and sectors around the world could cost, by our estimate, about $50 billion to $60 billion annually over the next two decades. Private-sector companies will account for about half of this spending, government for the rest. Many of these investments yield positive returns in just three years.
(Source: McKinsey Quarterly)
2 comments:
very informative and interesting topics for business leaders and new comers....thanks for sharing...
I wonder how we all discuss things related to resources from the supply end. What we 'use' and produce as a waste is only talked with a limited scope and with a perspective that the waste production is a 'neccessity'.
A simple example if I may quote should be that we all face a problem of overhead tank running empty by afternoon in almost all flats based housing societies. Then we will talk of limited water supplies from corporation and with respect to our usage patterns we will use alternate commodities such as 'electricity' to pump in the required quantity.
We have always failed in introspecting our usage and storage patterns. By storage patterns I mean we all would start accumulating water in our home based reservoirs. But what 'we', as a society, have failed to introspect.
Let us face it that water resources can be recreated with a huge cost. The cost to change our usage patterns would be much less than that.
Our 'Ideas' that we put is 'Action' for a pre-programmed 'Objective' is creating the problem.
Small efforts done to reuse the 'waste' that we produce can work wonders.
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