SMC to cut water use by 50%
San Miguel Corp. (SMC) announced that the company would reduce operational water use by 50 percent across its businesses, employing measures that include water recycling, conservation and rainwater harvesting to meet this target by 2025.
Coinciding with World Water Day today, the Philippines’ largest conglomerate is taking on its own water sustainability challenge to reduce usage and educate employees, business partners and communities about water stewardship.
In an effort to further mesh sustainability into its business goals and processes,
San Miguel is rolling out an integrated water management system across its entire operations.
Water is an essential ingredient to many of San Miguel’s brands. For instance, beer is 90 percent water, and liquor is around 85 percent water.
Across the San Miguel Group, water is used to clean, cool, heat, produce steam and pasteurize. It is an important input to raw materials and packaging and major input to the power and oil refining industries.
“San Miguel is going to set an example in its responsible use and management of water,” said SMC president and chief operating officer Ramon Ang.
“Many of our facilities are already efficient in terms of using water, but we can always do more. Given the scale of our need, we’re working to become more conscious about our water footprint.”
Cutting groundwater use
A major component of San Miguel’s water strategy involves minimizing the amount of water it draws from ground water sources, through reusing and recycling process water and harvesting rainwater.
The company said it can also utilize surface runoff water (usually excess storm water) from mountains, creeks and rivers and filter and store this for irrigation.
Ang reports that the first year of implementation will focus on establishing baseline information, data that will then be analyzed in terms of costs to the business and the amount used – to see where the company could improve both in terms of efficiency and conservation.
Metering and establishing operating standards is the first order of the day. While many of the newer plants have water meters per line and per process, other older facilities rely on only one meter.
Installing separate water meters will make water audits relatively easier to perform, prevent wastage and improve efficiency.
Petron’s desalination plant
San Miguel’s newer facilities are all built with smart water usage in mind. Petron’s RMP-2 plant in Limay, Bataan is outfitted with the latest technology to reduce freshwater and groundwater consumption and minimize the environmental impact of wastewater discharge from its oil and gas operations.
Much of the raw water used by RMP-2 comes from the sea via a state-of-the art desalination facility. Desalination is a process that transforms salt water into consumable water.
Built at the cost of P474 million, the desalination plant supplies 25 percent of the roughly 2,100 cu m per hour total water requirements of the refinery. An estimated 60 percent of the total amount of water the refinery uses goes to its boiler-houses – to produce high-pressure steam that, in turn, is used both to generate power and to process steam.
For Petron RMP-2, further areas for water efficiency improvements are in power generation and the refining process itself. Recycling water is an important aspect of the refinery integrated water management system.
About 67 percent of the water RMP-2 uses is cycled back into the operations before being returned to the sea nearby. Ang’s challenge to refinery operators is to further increase the amount of recycled water without sacrificing product quality.
“It can be done. With technology in our newer facilities, we have enormous innovative capacity to tackle the challenge of water scarcity and create positive water impact.”
SMB efficiency is highest in 10 years
Another business where much has already been done in terms of improving water usage is San Miguel’s beer business. The company owns and manages five breweries in the Philippines.
Water is not only beer’s principal ingredient but also essential in the brewing process. Further driving up water usage in the production of beer is the use of agricultural raw material inputs that also place great demands on water.
In the brewing process, water is used in generating steam and in the cooling and washing processes. San Miguel Brewery’s efficiency levels have improved significantly over the last 10 years.
Nevertheless, the country’s leading brewer is looking to improve levels by reducing the amount of water related to packaging.
Each of the five breweries are equipped with on-site water treatment facilities, but Ang is confident that improvements can still be made to recapture and reuse wastewater across the operations.
With more fine- tuning in utility management and wastewater recovery, water use can potentially be cut down by as much as 20 percent in the older plants.