Water

SolWater

Water is vital for our Operations. It’s used for cooling, process needs and steam generation. Water risks linked to scarcity (recurrent and seasonal), quality (of inlet and outlet), compliance, reputation/conflicts, costs and generally inadequate management can jeopardize our business continuity and generate tremendous financial losses. Hence, our customers demand more and more sustainable products and solutions.

The main scope of this Standard is to provide best practices to minimize Site’s operational risk related to water through a Water risk assessment, prices and volumes levers, in line with Solvay One Planet initiatives and Group sustainability path by

• Optimizing water use
• Cost savings  (water treatment, taxes, energy, waste, fees, etc.)
• De-risking operations
• Water scarcity impact mitigation
• SOP Group Water Intake reduction target
• “Call for sustainability” from our customers (CDP ranking improvement) and value creation

Site Water strategy design and improvement of sustainable operations include:

• Identification of the water risks and the potential financial, regulatory and reputational impact
• Water Mass balance/Mapping to set the baseline and identify the main water users and the challenges
• Ideas generation aiming at reducing dependency to freshwater resources, improving quality of water in/out and pushing resources valorization/circular economy: reducing, reusing and recycling water.

Water risk assessment

Before jumping into the SolWater diagnostic core work, a Site should assess both basin and operational water risks.

What are basin risks?

Companies face different physical, regulatory and reputational risks due to the nature and conditions of the basins in which they are operating.

The WWF Water Risk Filter is a corporate and portfolio-level screening and prioritization tool to enable companies and investors to assess and respond to their water risks both now and in the future.

This Water Risk Filter Methodology documentation describes the water risk assessment framework, underlying structure and data sources for both basin and operational risk assessment as well as scenario risk assessment. This methodology documentation is updated periodically to reflect  latest data updates and other changes as need be, so please ensure you are using the latest version available on the website.

More on basins risk analysis done at Solvay here (contact Contact SOP-I Water taskforce team to analyze your site’s Basin Risk)

What are operational risks?

Companies face different physical, regulatory and reputational operational risk based on how their sites depend on water for its activities, manage water and potentially impact on the basin.

Template to assess water operational risk here

SolWater Diagnostic

Let’s start by capturing a baseline of the current water usage, deploying a visual tool capable of designing flow-charts/maps (GSlides, Gsheet, Microsoft Visio, etc.).

What are key characteristics of the SolWater diagnostic?

• “80-20” principle and Agile methodology: start from macro-picture and move to granular by priority
• Cross-functional topic (connections between water, energy, waste, emissions and costs)
• Search for low hanging fruits (high impact/ easy implementation)

Who should be involved?

• Project leader
• Utilities manager
• HSE
• Production unit managers on demand

SolWater diagnostic is a 10 steps process:

1. Kick-off presentation - 1 day - see deep dive here
2. Global mass balance - 1-2 days - see deep dive here
3. Clarification - 2 days - see deep dive here
4. Mapping - 1-5 days
5. Confirmation with site
6. Analysis with experts - 1-2 days - see details for 6-10 here
7. Brainstorming ideas with site - 1 day
8. Idea evaluation - 1-5 days
9. Planning - 4 days
10. Implementation