Cutting Our Water Consumption
Georgia and neighboring states experienced one of the worst droughts on record in 2007. If anyone needed reminding that water conservation is a top priority, the drought did the job.
Southwire’s main use of water is to cool wire and rod during production. We recycle our cooling water by sending it through one process several times before it must be diverted to another. When the water quality reaches a critical level that could affect the quality of our wire, we treat the water and then discharge it to the local municipal sewer system or, in the case of our Carrollton rod mill, to a holding pond where it evaporates. Our Kentucky Rod Mill is permitted to discharge process water to the nearby Ohio River.
In October 2007, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue asked residents and industries across the state to cut their water use by 10 percent. In response, Southwire reduced the quantity of surface water withdrawn from our lake. We met the governor’s request by recycling our process water more times before discharging it. And we did it without any effect on wire quality.
So why did it take drought conditions and the governor’s request to get us to make this change? Good question. Smarter thinking about environmental sustainability is still gaining momentum at Southwire.
So now Southwire has its own water conservation goal – reducing the amount of water we consume by 15 percent by the end of 2010 (from a 2007 baseline).
In addition to consuming less water, Southwire tries to draw our water from a variety of sources, helping ease our demand on any one of them. In 2000, long before the 2007 drought, Southwire installed a four-million-gallon tank to hold storm water collected from different points across our Carrollton campus. Southwire also drilled several wells on campus as a back-up water supply. In addition, Southwire required each of its manufacturing facilities to develop a water conservation plan in order to identify secondary sources of water and to eliminate unnecessary water use.
