Developing a national guideline for industry water efficiency in South Africa

The South African industry - and in particular, the food and beverage industry - is a very important player in the national economy and most multinational enterprises have production facilities in the country producing goods for the entire Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

Furthermore, South Africa has a significant agriculture requiring a lot of irrigation so together with the industry, the food production consume a significant part of the available water resources, and available water supply is obviously essential for both industry and agricultural production. Due to the droughts, the industrial wastewater discharge to rivers furthermore poses higher environmental risks towards nature and biodiversity. Despite the critical water situation, many South African industries are still using more water compared to Best Available Technology standards such as EU BREF, so there is a big potential in improving water efficiency and obviously also saving energy and operational costs.

To support the South African industry, NIRAS has developed a national guideline for water efficiency based on the four R’s “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rethink Water” providing the industries a range of examples to minimize their water consumption. The guideline is supposed to be used as inspiration for all types of industrial plants guiding to set up Key Performance Indicators and an internal Water Management Reporting system. In addition, NIRAS has developed a simple excel tool to support Water Management Reporting to monitor water metering and automatically producing a monthly management report on total and specific water consumption for up to 4 production lines as well as the administration visually showing water efficiency performance against South African industry specific benchmarks as well as EU BREF Best Available Technology standards.

The work has been made by experts from NIRAS Denmark, NIRAS South Africa and NIRAS Netherlands within Process Industry supported Excel experts from Data Science. The project has been financed by the Danish EPA and handed over to the National Department of Water and Sanitation of South Africa and the National Cleaner Production Centre South Africa. The National Department of Water and Sanitation of South Africa is the authorizing agency for permitting water abstraction outside public water supply areas.

In July 2024, NIRAS attended a series of workshops in Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth supporting the Department of Water and Sanitation and National Cleaner Production Centre of South Africa with developing national water balance guidelines for industries, as well as a digital tool for industrial water management.