Having a sustainable water strategy can do a lot more than just care for the environment – there are more costs behind water than the price of the water itself, and many businesses don’t realize this until it’s too late.

Total Water Solutions explains why a good water strategy is important, and how to make your business water strategy more sustainable.

Make sure it’s pure and not contaminated

Although it might seem like an odd way to conserve water, making sure your water sources are pure is a vital part of monitoring how much you use.

Water that’s contaminated with one particular virus might still be perfectly fine to use on plants, whereas another might only affect people through direct ingestion – this changes how you use that water source until it’s purified, meaning that a rural farm could end up with a lot of wastewater that’s simply too contaminated to use, or a large office building may need to switch to a backup water tank until the infection can be dealt with.

Use more efficient appliances

Many homes and businesses have kept the same appliances for at least a decade, being unwilling to switch to a different one unless they have no other choice. However, the developments that have been made in the last ten years have made most of these older models and designs not only obsolete, but counterproductive.

Toilets are the biggest example of this, with many older models having a single flush function. Modern toilet models have at least two, one of which is low-powered. Refusing to switch means that the stronger flush is being used every time, which can end up using far more water than necessary. The same can be said for sink taps, which are often far more powerful than they need to be without any limiters installed.

Grey water systems

Recycling water essentially allows you to multiply wastewater and re-use it elsewhere, and a grey water system can manage this itself without manual intervention being needed. Using a separate tank, the system takes some of the wastewater that would normally be discarded, cleans it, and re-adds it to other areas of the building’s water supply.

This is much more effective in a business that uses a lot of water on a daily basis – if an office building ‘s kitchens are always being used to clean dishes, for example, the water could be re-used over and over again to continue cleaning dishes, severely cutting down the amount of new water that needs to be used.

Grey water harvesting can be useful in rural areas, too – many farms already use a similar system to water crops using whatever they’ve recycled, and some eco-centric resorts are adopting the idea as part of their self-sufficient designs.

Cut back on utilities that need water

There’s quite a few waterless (or near-waterless) alternatives to utilities that we see in everyday life, and these could easily be adopted by businesses to drastically cut back on water rates. Waterless urinals can save up to 235m3 of water per year.

You can also physically remove some of the appliances that aren’t needed anymore. If you’ve noticed that there’s always one or two toilet stalls left unused in a specific office bathroom, then it might be worth removing them to cut down on the amount of water flowing through the pipes – especially if they automatically flush.

This can, as mentioned before, relate to how efficient a utility is – an employee bathroom could have its toilets slowly phased out for more efficient ones, or could have tank bank bags installed to reduce the amount of water that’s flushed, keeping the same amount of appliances whilst dropping the amount of water the room collectively uses per day.