Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chief executive of Nestle, the foods group, says businesses must wake up to the value of water. He warns of an impending crisis over supply, in the developed as well as the developing world, because of climate change and problems of over-use.
He says businesses may struggle in the future to find the water they need and will be forced to pay much higher prices for it, if more is not done to conserve the resource and distribute it more rationally.
These problems are not confined to poor countries, warns Mark Lane, partner at the law firm Pinsent Masons: "[While] it is true that in the developed world most people have access to toilets and a sewerage system … the problem that the developed world now faces is to adapt its waste-water systems to the changing circumstances brought about by climate change, and sudden much more extreme bouts of rainfall."
Mr Lane points out that in much of the developed world, the wastewater infrastructure has been constructed on the assumption of a temperate climate.
With global warming, which will bring more storms and floods and intense bouts of rainfall interspersed with periods of drought, that assumption no longer holds good.
As a result, in many countries the wastewater infrastructure will need to be expanded and upgraded to cope with much greater volumes of storm water. "This will cost huge sums of money," says Mr Lane, "and one key issue, for example in England and Wales, is how such infrastructure improvements are to be paid for."
Businesses can prepare by using water more efficiently. Some companies have started to take action, and a growing number of technologies are becoming available for businesses to make their use of water more efficient.
Pepsi Bottling Group (NYSE:PBG) , the drinks company, has managed to conserve 1m gallons of water per year at each of its plants, using new processes for cleaning equipment. The company can save 13,000 gallons a day on certain high-speed lines by using air instead of water to clean packaging. The company also uses 10 per cent less water through its upgraded reverse osmosis purification systems.
B&Q, the retail chain, has been actively monitoring water consumption since 2003. The company set a target to reduce mains use across UK outlets by 10 per cent by the end of 2008, but found that by the end of 2007 it was saving 20 per cent.
This has been achieved using methods such as harvesting rainfall for toilet flushing and using "smart water metering", allowing store managers to see in real-time how much water they are using. Monitoring use in this way lets the company quickly identify and deal with leaks, and helps prevent excessive usage.
Other techniques include recycling water. For instance, Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW) at its Terneuzen site in the Netherlands has been re-using about 70 per cent of the 2.6m gallons of the municipal waste water produced daily in the area.
Cutting water use can also help to cut energy use – Dow found its efforts at Terneuzen reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 60,000 tonnes per year.
But companies and consumers may be unaware of the amount of water they use, and the amount that goes into products.
Embedded water, also known as virtual or hidden water, is the water used in the production of goods that is invisible to the end user.
Examining the amount of embedded water in common products can give startling results. It takes 2,400 litres to produce a hamburger, and 11,000 litres to make a pair of jeans, including the water needed to grow the cotton.
Tim Jones, principal at Innovaro, says companies could attach "water labels", just as some are using carbon labels showing how much greenhouse gas was emitted during production. This would enable purchasers to make decisions based on environmental principles.
