Water is a precious resource for obvious reasons, but it also plays an essential role in our operations. We’re committed to recycling 50% of the water we use by 2025.
DOUBLING DOWN ON PROTECTING WATER
Water is an essential part of ADI’s operations and our water comes from public sources. We treat a significant portion of that water to produce the high purity deionized (DI) water necessary for our manufacturing operations. We carefully monitor our water usage (million gallons) at each of our operating facilities. We have set a goal to increase water recycling rate to 50% by 2025.
DOING MORE IN MANUFACTURING
Water conservation initiatives at our manufacturing sites have significantly contributed to lowering our overall water usage despite the company’s 74% growth. Our 2020 water usage (in million gallons) decreased by 7% from 2015, while water recycling rates increased to 30% from 15% in 2015.
ENVIRONMENTAL SPOTLIGHT
USING OUR WATER SMARTER
On the ADI Philippines campus, just one building (B1) consumes 71% of the site’s water supply. The three main water uses in it are the Cooling Towers, Deionized Water (DI) use, and domestic use. Knowing how much this building stands out as a high-usage case, we put our minds to devising an opportunity to reduce our resource impact—and decided to start by recycling B1’s used DI water for Cooling Tower use.
A Cooling Tower is a heat exchanger that uses air to help cool water, which is then used to cool the refrigerant of HVAC Chillers. But if water from the heat exchange is exposed to open air, there’s a chance for contamination, cooling inefficiencies, scaling, algae growth and the like. So, the water regularly needs to be flushed and simultaneously replaced with fresh water.
Instead of continuing to pull water from a public source, we installed a filtration system to use DI water as a source for our Cooling Tower’s flushing system. This meant there was no net new water needed to refresh the Cooling Tower, saving 9,000 cubic meters, or 2.3 million gallons, per month.
100% of raw water use was replaced by reclaiming water.
Overall, B1’s raw water consumption was reduced by an average of 30%
Reduction led to water conservation of 108,000 m3/year and a cost avoidance of $143,000 annually.