How can data analysis help your business conserve water?
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Water is a precious and scarce resource that every business should use wisely and efficiently. However, many businesses lack the data and insights to monitor and optimize their water consumption and identify potential savings and opportunities. In this article, we will explore how data analysis can help your business conserve water and improve your sustainability performance.
Water conservation is not only good for the environment, but also for your business. By reducing your water usage, you can lower your utility bills, enhance your reputation, comply with regulations, and avoid risks of water scarcity and disruption. Water conservation can also help you achieve your sustainability goals and contribute to the global efforts to combat climate change and protect biodiversity.
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Brijesh Dhruve, CFA-ESG, CEnv
GRI Certified Sustainability Professional | C.Eng. | PMP | ISWA Certified | Awarded
Leveraging data analysis is a game-changer for water conservation in business. It allows for: 1) Trend analysis to identify high consumption areas. 2) Real-time monitoring to promptly fix leaks. 3) Process optimization, conserving water without sacrificing efficiency. 4) Benchmarking for goal setting. 5) Predictive maintenance to prevent wastage. 6) Compliance with water regulations. 7) Enhanced sustainability reporting. Effective data use is not just cost-saving; it is critical for sustainable water management. #WaterConservation #DataAnalytics #Sustainability
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Leonard Teo
Technical Specialist | Driving Energy and Water Usage Reduction | Certified Energy Manager (SCEM) | Energy Transition | Decarbonisation | Water Circularity | Sustainability Strategy
Water is part of the water-energy-food nexus and is important to both sustainability and the survival of the human race. The indiscriminate use of water would result in the scarcity of water resource in the coming years and would result in potential water crisis. From an economic standpoint, water conservation would allow organisation to take stock of their usage and conserve organisational expenditure.
Measuring water is essential for conserving it, however, collecting and managing water data can be difficult for many businesses. Common obstacles include a lack of accurate and reliable water meters and sensors, inconsistent and incomplete data across different sources and locations, difficulty in accessing and integrating data from multiple stakeholders and platforms, as well as a lack of standardization and verification of water data quality and reporting.
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Ryan Kenney
ESG, Corporate Sustainability, Environmental Compliance
Obviously the best way to gather accurate water use data is through facily and system wide meters and sensors, but sometimes these are impractical due to cost or other reasons. At a minimum, facilities should have metered water intakes. This allows them to see the total amount of water that enters the facility, but not how the water is used. It's possible to estimate water used based on fixtures, number of individuals in the building, processes, etc, but it won't be as accurate as submetering.
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Leonard Teo
Technical Specialist | Driving Energy and Water Usage Reduction | Certified Energy Manager (SCEM) | Energy Transition | Decarbonisation | Water Circularity | Sustainability Strategy
Accurate water mapping would be important in water conservation. The mapping of incoming water usage across the enterprise would be essential to find wastage and opportunities for conservation. The challenge would be installing adeqate meters to form a water balance. Ideally, for each sub branch, there should just be one unknown to form a proper water balance but more often than not, there are inadequate meters.
Data analysis can help you gain valuable insights from your water data and overcome any challenges you may have. You can use data analysis to visualize and track your water consumption patterns and trends, identify and quantify water risks and opportunities, evaluate the performance of different water conservation measures, and communicate your data and achievements to stakeholders and customers. Additionally, you can use data analysis to compare different scenarios and benchmarks.
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Rawaa Al Saadi Milner
Harvesting Tomorrow’s Sustainability Solutions, Today | Avid Connector
Data analysis helps companies conserve water by monitoring usage, detecting patterns, predicting maintenance needs, optimizing processes, allocating resources wisely, benchmarking against industry standards, understanding employee behavior, and assessing environmental impact, enabling informed decisions and targeted actions to reduce consumption and costs.
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Leonard Teo
Technical Specialist | Driving Energy and Water Usage Reduction | Certified Energy Manager (SCEM) | Energy Transition | Decarbonisation | Water Circularity | Sustainability Strategy
Utilising data analysis would enable insights of usage patterns, conservation opportunities or just simply know where the water is used. Data analysis can be as simple as an excel spreadsheet but advanced data science techniques may be used to do more in-deptyh analysis or future projections. The result of data analysis have to be actionable and provide a clear course of action for consevation.
In order to conduct data analysis, you must use the correct tools and techniques. Depending on your needs and capabilities, you have a variety of options, such as spreadsheets and dashboards, which are straightforward and recognizable for organizing, calculating, and displaying water data. Data analytics software is more sophisticated and specialized for processing, analyzing, and visualizing data with various methods and algorithms. Data science and machine learning are the most advanced and capable tools for uncovering, forecasting, and optimizing water data with complex models and AI.
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Leonard Teo
Technical Specialist | Driving Energy and Water Usage Reduction | Certified Energy Manager (SCEM) | Energy Transition | Decarbonisation | Water Circularity | Sustainability Strategy
In the advanced world of data visualisation and advanced analytics, simple and effective tools are often forgotten. While dashboards such as powerbi as well as advanced analytics software begin to come up, one should realise that it is often the capability of the flowmeters as well as the handling of the raw data which is key to getting useful and actionable insights for conservation action to be taken.
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To maximize the value of data analysis, it's important to define your water data goals and questions clearly and realistically. You should also collect and store your water data securely and systematically, as well as clean and validate your water data regularly and thoroughly. Selecting the right data analysis tools and techniques for your water data is also essential, as is interpreting and communicating your data analysis results clearly and effectively.
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Daniel Enzer
Sustainability Research @ Altruistiq | On Purpose Fellow
When it comes to understanding water impacts there's two main areas to cover, use of freshwater and discharges of wastewater. Sustainability issues with water are inherently local - down to the river basin level, so you want to collect data at this level of granularity. Then to make this data useful we want to overlay other key metrics. What sources of water are used, how much is re-used? What pollutants are added to the wastewater, where is that deposited? A good data analysis will understand the full cycle of water and how a business interacts with it.
Data analysis is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process that necessitates constant improvement and adaptation. To maintain your data analysis, you should monitor and review your water data and analysis results periodically and critically. Additionally, seek and incorporate feedback and suggestions from stakeholders and experts, explore new data sources, tools, and techniques, learn and share your data analysis lessons and best practices with others, and celebrate your data analysis achievements and impacts.
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Ryan Kenney
ESG, Corporate Sustainability, Environmental Compliance
Water-related business risks are closely related to water-related impacts. For example, during periods of drought, local regulators might enforce limits on groundwater withdrawals. To accommodate, a company might have to purchase additional water from a non-stressed source. While it may be true that not all social and environmental impacts eventually manifest themselves as business risks, companies often find addressing major water impacts a prudent risk management strategy.