Responsible Water Management in Industrial Manufacturing
There are few conversations happening in the public sphere today as loudly as that of sustainability. While we are not looking to exploit an overused buzzword, we do see ample opportunity in supporting our customers as they navigate these conversations occurring within their own organizations. Industrial manufacturing as a market sector falls under considerable scrutiny for its relatively high energy and raw material consumption, but at the same time stands overwhelmingly well poised to make huge, positive impacts.
Across all the different fronts that sustainability turns up, the area of water and wastewater use is of particular concern. Media, political, and scientific communities alike see water insecurity as a developing major global threat to economic growth, geopolitical stability, and public health. World news aside, we here in the industrial manufacturing arena can surely take inspiration from these concerns, looking inward within our organizations for how best to do our part. From this perspective, we’ve prepared this article to offer insight into responsible, automated water and wastewater solutions rooted in advanced process controls that directly target sustainability.
What do we mean by Sustainability?
To start the discussion, we’d like to offer a definition of sustainability that speaks to technical manufacturing readers: sustainable manufacturing solves for minimizing consumption, maximizing productive and usable output, choosing replenishable resources, and eliminating harmful and irreversible environmental repercussions of our actions.
How does this apply to Industrial Water and Wastewater?
Industrial operations tend to view water as a consumable resource that has a given cost to procure and dispose of, which gets worked into both product costs and overhead costs to recoup. In this way, water is a low-value commodity acquired externally and then discharged externally once used, tracked purely as a necessary expense. Reframing this exchange in a sustainable fashion, water becomes viewed as a scarce, premium asset. Industrial manufacturers who adopt the responsibility of sustaining water resources treat water like gold, following three main tenants:
- Use as absolute little water as possible to conduct business,
- Assure that discharged water and wastewater is returned to the ecosystem at the same (or better) quality and composition as it was obtained, and
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- Embody stewardship and conservation of the water resources that are utilized, assuring long-term availability, safety, quality, and protection of those resources for generations to come.
Automating Process and Utility Water Sustainability
Right about here is where most blog posts on sustainability end, describing the concept a-la-Google but not providing any tangible details. We’re engineers here at Whitman Controls – we can’t skip the details!
Since we’re speaking to an audience interested in industrial automation, let’s zoom into this domain and break the discussion into two silos: manufacturers and users who consume water in their processes, and those who do not.
Wet Operations
For those who do have wet process and utility operations, we suggest five opportunities to support sustainable water and wastewater:
1. Start with Maintenance – as a first step, wet operations should perform thorough electromechanical maintenance on their process and utility systems to assure that individual components are working as intended, not causing wasteful water consumption or discharge.
2. Audit Existing Processes – many long-standing processes tend to have water waste built into their operating procedures, especially those where mechanical instruments and control loops have drifted out of calibration. Scrubbing these procedures of old-precedent wastefulness delivers immediate results, and should be followed by next updating documentation and retraining staff.
3. Leverage Data – adding flow, pressure, and analytical instruments along with online process control and historian applications (software that analyzes data over time) to your wet systems can provide immense data useful to seeing exact consumption rates, spikes, durations, and other key metrics. With this knowledge in hand, decisions driving efficiency can be aptly made.
4. Replace Judgment with Automation – in water workflows that rely on human judgment, significant over-use, unnecessary use, and excessive discharge can often be found. A few sensors and a few lines of code added to a central PLC can turn judgment-based decisions into computed decisions, accurate to levels that a human cannot achieve repeatedly. Even if your plant does not have central PLC, PAC, or SCADA controls, local point controllers can be added at key use points.
5. Expand your Visible Horizon – with the above internal improvements made, let’s turn outside to see what we can accomplish. Consumption and discharge details can be invaluable information to share with local regulators and utility providers, allowing them to better plan for your business’ needs up- and downstream. In addition, process automation performance data (such as gallons of water per unit, or water treatment efficacy) can lead to meaningful discussions with third-party standardization agencies, certifiers, and technology resources, who can measure your data against industry benchmarks and suggest further action. Overall, the goal in this step is to collaborate with others, promoting long-term water conservation.
Dry Operations
Even businesses that do not actively consume water for process, utility, or other product-adjacent purposes can still play a role in supporting sustainable water use. The below are a few opportunities for dry operations, as well as additional avenues for wet operations to consider:
1. Examine your Value Chain – somewhere in your value chain water and wastewater is most likely consumed, and your purchases or sales to that point in the chain carry influence. While we’re not suggesting full-blown audits of these other entities, we do suggest inquiring about opportunities where working together can lead to smarter water use. Perhaps you’re purchasing a material that requires water post-treatment, and a different air-cooled alternative is available (such as with certain plastic containers). Or perhaps your clients are consuming water to clean items you send them, when instead you could offer dry irradiation as a value-added service to alleviate this cleaning step.
2. Think Total Lifecycle – some may think it’s a stretch, but the impacts of any given product can be directly connected to our water resources at some point in their lifecycle, most often in a negative way. A great example is found in landfills – dry production waste as well as discarded products themselves end up in landfills, which are inevitably positioned in some relation to an existing surface or groundwater source. Leachate can percolate from solid waste stores into these water sources, and contaminant vapor can evaporate into the local atmosphere and be transferred to farther-off water sources. To this end, decisions about how your waste streams and end-of-life products will be handled, as well as the upstream waste your activity generates in the supply chain, all have a tangible impact on water.
The above opportunities are high-level, and can lead to any number of discrete, tangible projects that can put automation to work towards sustaining water resources well into the future. Even more advanced technological solutions that utilize instrumentation along with machine learning and enterprise-level optimization are possible. In all cases, our hope is that we’ve spurred some ideas that industrial users can chew on further – please contact us if you’d like to dig deeper!
As a veteran-owned small business, Whitman Controls is dedicated to supplying premium quality, reliable, technologically advanced instrumentation for use in nearly any application.
Our Bristol, CT manufacturing facility embodies over 40 years of engineering, fabrication, and customer service expertise, serving both end-user and manufacturing customers nationwide through direct and distribution channels.
Our values drive us to provide the highest level of servant partnership that you can find. To discuss your applications or to learn more about our capabilities, please contact us at (800) 233-4401, via email at [email protected], or online at www.whitmancontrols.com.
