On the water front...
How we approach saving and recycling water differs across our business and by locality. That’s because – unlike the impact of carbon emissions – impact on water supplies tend to be localised.
Aspects like the weather and season, water quality and other users of the water system are complex, and create a unique requirement for each area. This means that often the most effective ideas for reducing our impact on water supplies will arise out of local knowledge. Our medicine purification plant in Port Fairy, Australia is a case in point.
Water recycling at Port Fairy
Australia has been under constant threat of drought in recent years. As a result, the local community is aware of the need to conserve water and it has become a passionate issue within society. Up until just a few years ago, our Port Fairy site used approximately 300,000 litres of water per day. Following a suggestion from an employee, we initiated a project to reduce the water requirements of the plant by about 20%.
Previously, fresh water was required for three stages of the medicine purification process. Now, instead of pulling fresh water from the local supply for each stage, the same water is recycled and used throughout. This amounts to around 30 million litres of saved water every year. The amount of waste water has also been significantly reduced.
Water savings at Ulverston
A different approach has been developed by staff at our antibiotics manufacturing plant at Ulverston in Cumbria. The site opened in 1948 and has played a key role in recent years in our fight against infectious diseases. However with such a long history, parts of the plant had inevitably become redundant over time as manufacturing processes and products changed.
Staff at Ulverston realised that adapting the old plant to accommodate new processes was wasting both energy and water. So over the past two years they have moved the entire solvent recovery facilities to a new, purpose-built section of the plant. This has enabled them to turn off the old plant ‘at source’, resulting in significant water savings. They have also had some success with ultrasonic leak testing – a standard practice for identifying underground leaks. One example was the discovery of a water line supplying the nearby town which was leaking ‘full bore’.
Projects such as these have seen Ulverston achieve a 37% reduction in water use since 2009 – the equivalent of nearly 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Steps like those taken at Ulverston and Port Fairy are being carried out right across our global sites, as we strive to meet our ambitious target of a 20% reduction in water consumption by 2020.
