Kemira – Safe and clean water

Purpose

Kemira is in the field of business of chemistry expertise. Safe, sustainable chemistries are a part of good life, ensuring hygiene, safe water, food safety and more. Climate change and the growing global population mean that ensuring everyone has access to this most precious of resources is one of our biggest challenges.

Results

Our water footprint

In Kemiras operations, they 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 Fresh water use intensity is defined as m3 water withdrawn minus cooling water use per ton of production.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 2020 was 1.9 m3 per metric tonnes of production.

Implementation

Our water handprint

Kemira serves water-intensive industries, and our solutions help make more clean, safe water available to everyone. They call this their water handprint. They do this in three main ways.

Firstly, through our work with cities’ and municipalities’ water treatment plants, they help ensure citizens have access to the clean, safe, and affordable drinking water they need for a healthy life.

Secondly, Kemira helps municipalities and industries ensure that discharged wastewater meets environmental permit standards, reducing the load on local water bodies.

Thirdly, they 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.