(Atlanta, Ga. — March 7, 2023) – Officials at the 2023 WateReuse Symposium in Atlanta announced the inaugural class of Industrial Water Reuse Champion Award winners.
The Industrial Water Reuse Champion Awards recognize top companies that incorporate best-in-class water recycling and reuse programs to improve water stewardship and achieve their water management goals. As drought and other water challenges compound in the West and across the United States, water reuse offers an important tool to help the business community do their part in contributing to sound water management and creating new sources of local water nationwide. The winners will be featured at a side event during the upcoming UN Water Conference, March 22-24 in New York City, highlighting the private sector’s role in developing global water solutions and meeting ambitious climate and infrastructure goals.
For 2023, the organizing partners presented awards to three champions representing the food and beverage, technology and energy industries:
- APA Corporation – For its produced water management approach in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. Over the last five years, more than 95 percent of the water used by APA subsidiary, Apache, has been recycled produced water or non-fresh groundwater. Of the 179,700,000 barrels of water used by Apache in 2021, 157,980,000 barrels were recycled produced water. Just one percent of the company’s operational water use in 2021 was sourced from freshwater.
- PepsiCo – For ongoing water reuse activities and its forward-looking strategy to achieve water resiliency. PepsiCo has set water reuse targets for 2025 and 2030, which include a water positive goal to replenish back into local watersheds more than 100 percent of the water used at manufacturing sites in high-water-risk areas. Existing achievements in water reuse include: recycling nearly 75 percent of process water at one potato chip manufacturing facility, the installation of wastewater treatment technologies to produce potable grade water for reuse in processing, and the provision of a water stewardship grant to a local water replenishment district to pilot the first inland injection well system for aquifer recharge.
- Intel Corporation – For its investment in water recycling across its operations. Intel has invested approximately $1 billion in the construction and operation of innovative onsite industrial wastewater treatment facilities in Arizona, Oregon and Israel, to enable sites to treat and reuse billions of gallons of water each year. These facilities can recover 98 percent of the influent wastewater to feed cooling towers, abatement systems and other equipment. In some locations, the permeate is also sent offsite to enable surrounding communities to reclaim the water for groundwater recharge, wetlands, and irrigation.
The Industrial Water Reuse Champions Award program was developed by the WateReuse Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Veolia, and University of Pennsylvania Water Center as part of the National Water Reuse Action Plan (WRAP), a multi-stakeholder effort lead by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to advance the science, policy, research, communications and more supporting water reuse and recycling.
