How can a pump save water? After all, its job is to, well, pump the stuff? You know, lift it out of the ground, send it rushing around the place, enable us to have more of it where and when we need it?
The answer is to make it smart. Equip it with sensors, give it intelligence - and it gets miserly. Which is just as well, for in a world where freshwater demand is set to rise by a third by 2030 – it’s still wasted as if supply was endless.
Take leaks. We all know that the pipes beneath our cities are notoriously leaky. Around 28% of London’s clean water supply never makes it to the taps. In some Italian cities, the figure is as high as 70%. For most other products, that would be a sacking offence. “Imagine you were producing beer ”, says Grundfos CEO Mads Nipper, “and you told your board, ‘Oh, by the way, about half of what we brew will never reach the customer…’. You wouldn’t last long in your job.”
Most people would agree that water is a trifle more essential than beer – and we can’t make any more of it. In some European cities, consumption is already much higher than the natural replenishment rate. So why does so much go to waste?
One practical answer is pressure. Pumping water at high pressure around ageing pipe networks is a recipe for leakage. Reduce the pressure, and you cut the leaks. But you also have a lot of dissatisfied customers – whether running a factory or standing in a shower, we like high pressure water. But the pressure doesn’t need to be constant, night and day – it can rise and fall in accordance with demand. Which is where “smart”, sensor-equipped pumps come in. They sense the changes in demand, and tweak the pressure accordingly. At a stroke – or quite a lot of strokes, in practice - this can cut by half the amount of water lost to leaks.
And what works at utility level can work in the home too, says Nipper. “How often do you turn on the shower in the morning, and then stand there for ages waiting for the water to run hot? And meanwhile sending a lot of water down the drain?” A small device known as a Comfort pump can do away with the waste by simply recirculating the water so it’s hot within a few seconds of coming out of the shower head. Again, the amount of water that can be saved is astonishing. “If there were one in every US household, it would save 2.3m cubic metres of water a year. That’s more than half New York’s annual consumption.”
All that wasted water has, of course, been treated to drinking quality standards – a process that uses a lot of energy. Yet ironically, a lot of that super-clean, energy-intensive water is used for purposes which don’t really need clean water at all – like flushing toilets, or low-grade industrial uses. Smart pumps can play a role here too, by making it possible to use the same water twice. They can recirculate it so that, for example, waste water from a dishwasher or a shower can flush the loo.
So pumping solutions can provide a practical way of cutting water waste, but there’s a political aspect too: how water is priced. And that’s a lot more contentious. Part of the reason we, as a society, waste water, is that we can afford to do so. It’s ironic, to put it mildly, that the most essential commodity for our survival is one of the cheapest. Yet any move to increase prices meets with howls of protest. On the one hand, water is such a basic human need that charging more for it, particularly if those charges are levied by a private corporation, seems deeply unjust. On the other, if we don’t pay more for it, how will we learn to value it? Politically, Nipper admits, that’s a tough nut to crack. But meanwhile, we could at least be more aware of how much we’re using – particularly in business.
It may come as a surprise that many companies still don’t measure their water use. They know how much their total water bills are – but as Nipper points out, that’s not necessarily the same as knowing their total consumption. Just as most major companies now measure – and aim to reduce - their carbon emissions, he argues, so they should do for water, too. Again, there’s plenty of scope to cut waste. Commercial water losses in developing countries alone come to around $2.6bn (£1.7bn) per year (pdf) – which is more than the World Bank’s entire lending budget for water projects in the developing world.
So is Grundfos walking the talk? “Yes, we’ve set a target to reduce our total water use by 50% by 2025 (compared to 2008). So yes, we are trying to take our own medicine.”
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