Sustainable Water Management - The complete picture

Overcoming the many challenges we face, both from drought and from flooding, is likely to require the development and implementation of tailored localised strategies. 

Urban building design, including how buildings capture and use water, has become a key focus as these strategies have begun to evolve.  And Kingspan has undertaken to play its part.  

We can see how buildings can be adapted to become net positive contributors to the water cycle by:

a) Using water more efficiently 

b) “Generating” water supplies on-site

c) Recycling water better 

Using water more efficiently means installing water efficient appliances such as aerated taps.  

Meanwhile generating water supplies on-site can be done extremely effectively through rainwater harvesting systems.  We are aiming to harvest 100 million litres of rainwater every year at our offices and manufacturing sites by 2030.  This will help us to reduce mains water use, lower rainwater/stormwater runoff, and improve the quality of local waterways. All the collected water will be either used by Kingspan in our operations or sold/donated.  Harvested rainwater can be used for a number of non-potable (i.e. non-drinking) applications - from washing vehicles, to watering plants, and flushing WCs.  

And we are reusing water through process recycling.  Processing water in treatment plants consumes energy so reducing our dependency on mains water will also reduce our energy use and CO2 generation.  

In rural Uganda, access to clean, safe drinking water is not always easy, so Kingspan’s Water & Energy division in Australia has partnered with the local Cotton On Foundation to bring freshwater to remote communities.  

The work of the Cotton On Foundation has already made a real difference in the Lwengo and Rakai Districts of Southern Uganda.  It has installed giant Rhino water tanks supplied by us into seven schools in the region.  The Rhino tanks capture and store rainwater, supplying freshwater to more than 5,000 schoolchildren. 

Rhino water tanks have also been placed in a health centre which cares for 500-600 patients per month. 

The Foundation has plans to install Rhino tanks to help more than 4,000 children in three additional communities, all as part of its wider goal to create 20,000 quality educational places. 

“Some of the children in the schools we service would have to walk three or four miles for clean water. Now they can just step out of school and fill up their bucket.” Tim Diamond, General Manager Cotton On, Uganda. 

We are also mindful of the need to clean-up our oceans, removing tonnes of man-made debris and plastic waste.  

The UN, at its Ocean Conference in June 2017, stated that more than 8 million tonnes of plastic enter the oceans each year, and that as much as 80 per cent of all the litter in our oceans is plastic waste.

We have joined forces with the ECOALF Foundation – a not-for-profit organisation whose main objective is to promote the selective recovery of ocean waste, allowing it to be recycled and avoiding its harmful effects on the environment. 

Under the terms of the 3-year partnership, we will help to remove up to 150 tonnes of plastic waste from the Mediterranean each year through the ECOALF Foundation’s network of 2,600 fishermen in Spain. Our aim is to reuse as much of the ocean plastic recovered as we can in our production plants.