Our water handprint
Kemira serves water-intensive industries, and our solutions help make more clean, safe water available to everyone. We call this our water handprint. We do this in three main ways.
Firstly, through our work with cities’ and municipalities’ water treatment plants, we help ensure citizens have access to the clean, safe, and affordable drinking water they need for a healthy life.
Secondly, we help municipalities and industries ensure that discharged wastewater meets environmental permit standards, reducing the load on local water bodies.
Thirdly, we help water-intensive industries use less water and make their processes more sustainable, for example by enabling them to use recycled water rather than freshwater in their processes.
Kemira is committed to the CEO Water Mandate, advancing best practices in water stewardship.
Our water footprint
In our own operations, we are continuously evaluating opportunities to decrease water withdrawal, consumption, discharge, and associated impacts through water recycling and reuse. This includes process redesign and optimization projects in our upgraded and new production lines.
With about 90% of total water withdrawal, Kemira’s manufacturing processes require water primarily for cooling purpose. It can be discharged back to the environment without any further treatment required.
Kemira’s target is to continuously improve freshwater use intensity. Fresh water use intensity is defined as m3 water withdrawn minus cooling water use per ton of production. Baseline is 2019 at 1.9 m3 per metric tonnes of production. Fresh water use intensity in 2023 was 1.3 m3 per metric tonnes of production.
Kemira’s new water target is to improve water management to Leadership level based on CDP Water Security scoring methodology by the end of 2025.
