Artemis Water Strategy

Water resilience for a thirsty future

May 23 2017

Piloting “Spaceship Earth” into a Circular Economy

The earth’s first “selfie,” courtesy of NASA

As leading corporations shift to restorative production, water engineers will find themselves at the center of the first wave.

Almost 50 years ago, the humankind first saw our planet in a galactic context and transformed engineers’ perspective on manufacturing. These first “selfies” of the earth showed our entire world as an isolated blue marble with the vast void of space, the single location where humans could survive. Space had been the passion storytellers and philosophers, but the dream of space travel had been realized by leading-edge scientists and engineers.

During the 1960s, a new science of industrial ecology redefined industrial operations for the limited resources of a “spaceship world.” In the Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth (1966), Kenneth Ewart Boulding describes a global transition from a “cowboy economy” that naively exploits resources in a world that is a “virtually illimitable plane.” Humankind had begun to see the earth as “a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or pollution.” With all of our resources already onboard, economic well-being cannot be defined simply by the rate of consumption or production: “Man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form,” Boulding wrote. Later, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth laid out a new paradigm for designing operations to balance production and well-being with an eye towards future productivity and resources.

In the last decade, scarcity shocks and ecosystem deterioration have brought that discussion of caring for “spaceship earth” from the realm of economists and policy leaders back to business leaders. Ecosystem degradation and depletion of natural resources are beginning to have far-reaching, bottom-line consequences. Shortages are generating price hikes and supply chain risks, which have caught the eye of investors and leading corporations. Circular economy initiatives are bringing some of the most forward-looking business leaders together to rethink manufacturing and production as well as our concept of progress to build a restorative economy. The circular economy is  “a continuous positive development cycle that preserves and enhances natural capital, optimizes resource yields, and minimizes system risks by managing finite stocks and renewable flows. It works effectively at every scale.”

Untangling Supply Chains

In 2013, champion solo yachtsman Dame Ellen MacArthur brought the looming waste and raw materials crisis into stark focus at the World Economic Forum. She harked back to images of ships: “At sea, what you have is all you have, stopping en route to restock is not an option, and careful resource management can be a matter of life or death …My boat was my world, I was constantly aware of its supply limits, and when I stepped back ashore, I began to see that our world was not any different. I had become acutely aware of the true meaning of word ‘finite,’ and when I applied it to resources in the global economy, I realized there were some big challenges ahead.” Since then, the MacArthur Foundation has worked with a growing group of partners to organize an initial group of industrial consortia to untangle complex and ever widening supply chains. In 2016, it convened leading companies, city governments philanthropists and policymakers to rethink the future of plastics.

Last week, leaders in the fashion industry announced the Circular Fibres Initiative at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit with industry leaders such as Inditex, H&M, Adidas, Kering, M&S, Bestseller and Nike pledging their support. While manufacturing processes may not be as resource-intensive as mining or electronics manufacturing, the clothing industry can realize critical efficiencies with circular manufacturing and product design. According to McKinsey, clothing production has doubled between 2000 and 2014. Consumers are spending an estimated 60 percent more on clothing and using that clothing for half the time they did 15 years ago. In the US, up to 85 percent of those textiles go to landfill, with precious raw materials lost for the future. The initiative aims to create a vision for a new global textiles system that will replace the linear, “take-make-dispose” model dominating the industry, with a goal of eliminating all textile waste by the year 2037. Initial work by MacArthur, McKinsey, and others has been followed by initiatives from the apparel industry. Signatories of the Call to Action committed to defining a circular strategy, setting targets for 2020 and reporting on their progress.

Is Water Innovation the Starting Point?

Circular economy manufacturing is emerging from the halls of Davos, the European Union, and corporate boardrooms to drive industry action. Over the next five years, circular economy strategy studies and planning projections will mature into budgets and technology adoption. Water technology and innovation will stand at the center of many of these initiatives. “Since water is the single most important shared resource across all supply chains, and wastewater is the largest untapped waste category—as big as all solid-waste categories taken together—it is the natural starting point for the circular revolution,” writes Martin Stuchtey, Managing Partner at SystemIQ and author of the A Good Disruption: Redefining Growth in the Twenty-First Century.

At the BlueTech Forum in Dublin on June 7, senior operations and sustainability executives from leading corporations will be meeting to discuss how they’re translating circular economy strategies into their work plans. Artemis principal Laura Shenkar will be leading a roundtable discussion with Menno Holterman CEO, of Nijhuis Industries.

  • Where is the “lowest hanging fruit” for water in circular economy initiatives?
  • How much savings justify the expense and risk of new solutions?
  • How can pay-for-performance financing offset risks?

Courtesy of Dow Water and Process Solutions

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Circular economy, Innovation

Jan 09 2017

Dow Water’s Path to the Circular Economy

gms-mexico-plant-from-dow-study
Is water the natural starting point for the circular economy?

Eliminating waste is one of the magical overlaps between business and the environment. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, circular supply chains that increase the rate of recycling, reuse and remanufacturing could generate more than $1 trillion a year by 2025. Moving from a linear economy, where raw materials are used once and thrown away, to a circular economy where inputs are reused and waste eliminated, is a long-term economic imperative if we are to support a world population of nine billion.

Dow Water is among the first industry incumbents to plot a market strategy aimed at the circular economy. It is offering an alternative to Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) solutions, that it calls “minimal liquid discharge” (MLD).  MLD is a toolbox of products and proprietary system designs that Dow claims deliver low-risk benefits today and incrementally while building toward the long-term promise of the circular economy. “In a perfect world, industry could reclaim and reuse 100% of the wastewater it produces. But in the real world, many companies find that this goal.. is costly and difficult to achieve,” notes Snehal Desai, Dow Water’s Global Business Director.

Real world alternative to the holy grail of ZLD?

For decades, policy leaders have touted zero liquid discharge (ZLD) as a cornerstone for forward-looking water projects, from gargantuan Chinese desalination facilities to new manufacturing sites in Island Nations and US power plants. As water becomes scarce and disposal costs skyrocket, manufacturers see the immediate value of decreasing waste. However, moving real-world operations toward zero waste isn’t an overnight event. “If there was ever a Holy Grail of water recovery and reuse in an industrial plant, then it is undoubtedly … ZLD,” wrote industry pundit Gord Cope in 2009. “While it may be difficult and expensive to achieve, zero liquid discharge is easy to define.” Eight years later, analysts continue to project a future market for $100M – $200M annual revenues on the horizon.  Although ZLD holds great promise to reduce water pollution and augment water supply, its viability is determined by a balance among the benefits associated with ZLD, energy consumption, and capital/operation costs,” membrane experts Tiezheng Tong and Menachem Elimelech of Yale University noted in a recent survey of leading-edge low-energy membrane solutions.

costcomparison“Discharge mitigation efforts don’t need to be an all or nothing proposition,” explains Desai.  By combining state-of-the-art equipment and proprietary systems design, Dow claims that it can provide 95% of the benefit of ZLD at less than half the cost. In choosing its strategy to help customers shift operations, Dow is leveraging more than its product technologies, drawing on decades of experience with diverse operations around the globe.  Moving from a model of “selling stuff” to a model of selling performance reflects the vision of the circular economy.  Dow is aligning itself with the long-term strategy of many of the world’s leading manufacturers to reduce risk in their supply chain driven by circular economy initiatives by the World Economic Forum and other business leadership collaboratives.

Case study: General Motors’ San Luis Potosi, Mexico Assembly Plant

One early case study is the General Motors (GM) vehicle assembly plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico (about 400 km northwest of Mexico City), which opened in 2008. The plant, which has an annual capacity of 160,000 cars, is located in an arid, remote area with no receiving stream or municipal sewer available to discharge wastewater. Through a combination of reverse osmosis (RO) technology, a proprietary high-rate chemical softening process, and other technologies, the plant can convert up to 90% of its tertiary wastewater into reusable water, leaving less than 10 percent of liquid waste for discharge into adjacent solar ponds for evaporation.

Collaborative economics of water at community scale– a new challenge for global giants

Desai sees scarcity and regulation driving new models for water management.  “There are new economics for water that are driving an innovation revolution, not just focused on products and technology, but a fresh take on how businesses, governments, and other stakeholders work together,” Desai explains.  “Collaboration can help drive advancements in technology and new methods for valuing natural capital.” For example, the Dow Terneuzen site in the Netherlands is the city’s largest employer and heaviest industrial water user. Dow collaborated with the municipal water board and a local water company to implement an innovative wastewater recycling program that uses every liter of water three times, instead of just once. As a result, the plant has reduced the energy use associated with water treatment by 95 percent– the equivalent of reducing its carbon dioxide emissions by 60,000 tons each year.

“Since water is the single most important shared resource across all supply chains, and wastewater is the largest untapped waste category—as big as all solid-waste categories taken together—it is the natural starting point for the circular revolution,” writes Martin Stuchtey, Managing Partner at SystemIQ and author of the A Good Disruption: Redefining Growth in the Twenty-First Century. “Water is a powerful driver of yield in almost any industrial process and the extraction of raw materials…taken together, these advantages can turn water into a major value driver,” Stuchtey notes.

With a vast global presence in water operations and a parent company that is one the world’s biggest manufacturers, Dow Water has a unique view of market drivers for new water equipment.  MLD’s approach and its early results are worth watching.  Join us at the Cleantech Forum’s Water Summit to hear more from Dow Water’s Senior R&D Manager, Abhishek Shrivastava.  See more useful resources on the circular economy below.

circular_economy_diagram_foundation_feb2015-01_cqrtnr

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Resources on the Circular Economy:

  • “From linear to circular-Accelerating a proven concept.” Towards the circular economy. Accessed January 07, 2017. http://reports.weforum.org/toward-the-circular-economy-accelerating-the-scale-up-across-global-supply-chains/from-linear-to-circular-accelerating-a-proven-concept/.
  • Stuchtey, Martin. “Rethinking the water cycle.” McKinsey & Company. May 15, 2015. Accessed January 07, 2017. http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/rethinking-the-water-cycle.
  • Stuchtey, Martin R., Per-Anders Enkvist, and Klaus Zumwinkel. A good disruption: redefining growth in the twenty-first century. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
  • WorldEconomicForum. “Ellen MacArthur | The Circular Economy Imperative.” YouTube. February 19, 2016. Accessed January 07, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPZFNvrnO4E.

Images: Top and Middle courtesy of Dow Water 

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Circular economy, Corporate Sustainability · Tagged: circular econony, Dow, water reuse, ZLD

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