The water equation

Across Europe, drought is a recurring reality – and no longer confined to the south. While water increasingly shapes where industries locate, its value is determined by local context. There are many technological routes to water efficiency in industrial processes, but location, energy needs and other factors are also key.

Water is surprisingly cheap, as long as it’s available. For decades, much of European industry treated reliable water supply like any other piece of basic infrastructure: essential but largely taken for granted.

That has changed. Water is no longer an abstract environmental issue; it determines where businesses build. The numbers confirm that conservation alone will not solve the problem. According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), EU freshwater withdrawals fell by 14 percent between 2000 and 2023. Yet the area affected by water scarcity has not decreased since 2010; the situation has worsened as higher temperatures increase evaporation and rainfall becomes less predictable.

Water is now critical infrastructure – driving location choices and impacting competitiveness. When it is scarce, production becomes more difficult. If extensive treatment or disposal is required, costs rise. And when municipal infrastructure reaches its limits, it’s not just businesses that foot the bill, but also the people who live there.

In 2023, 28 percent of the EU territory and 32 percent of its population were affected by water scarcity during at least one quarter. As a long-term average, seasonal water stress affects about 30 percent of the EU region and one-third of its population. And it doesn’t stop at the Alps.

One resource, different realities

Yet the statistics illustrate why a single European – let alone global – solution to water scarcity is not the answer. A liter of water has different economic value in Andalusian Spain versus Denmark, where precipitation is higher. Likewise, a food producer has different requirements for water quality and hygiene than a chemical plant or mine. And municipalities view water differently than industrial facilities, even though both use the same infrastructure.

These differences shape the day-to-day operations of every industry. But when you look across industries, another pattern emerges: Many underlying process steps are similar, even if the conditions are not: Water has to be separated, cleaned, measured, recovered or reused. That is where GEA’s strength lies: working with customers across many sectors and transferring proven strategies and process knowledge from one context to another.

Dr. Stefan Pecoroni, Vice President of Sustainability, Process Technology & Innovation, Business Line Separation at GEA, challenges producers to ask themselves two key questions: What is the specific water pain point at a given site? Is it scarcity, cost, wastewater treatment, regulation or energy use. Second, where can action deliver the greatest impact?

Saving water without considering the energy balance is like flying blind

Recycling water requires pumping, cleaning, filtering or treatment – and therefore energy. The more companies move toward closed-loop systems, the more important it becomes to assess water-saving investments against energy use, operating requirements, CO₂ emissions, costs, risk and the regulatory requirements that apply to a specific industry and location.

Where water is scarce or expensive, that balance may clearly favor reuse. Elsewhere, the more relevant question is not which technology saves the most water, but which solution delivers the greatest sustainable benefit under the specific local conditions.

From good intentions to industrial reality

Whether a water-saving strategy or technology works is rarely the greatest hurdle. There are plenty of pilot projects. The real challenge is turning a successful trial into a new industrial standard. In fact, scaling up is much more a management task than a technical issue.

In the dairy and beverage industries, water consumption, cleaning and wastewater have long been the traditional levers for improving efficiency – yet results vary widely.

Two dairies reached their goal to substantially reduce water consumption using calculations based on their specific situation and needs: SalzburgMilch by looking at their combined freshwater and wastewater costs; and Ammerland Dairy by optimizing an existing process. In both cases, the savings also make a direct contribution to the companies’ sustainability goals.

What one industry can learn from another

In 2022, the German manufacturing sector used a total of 5.15 billion cubic meters of water. The chemical industry alone accounted for 3.08 billion cubic meters. These figures illustrate the scale of water use, as well as the extent water use varies by industry.

The greatest impact occurs when best practice is implemented across industry applications. And yet, siloed thinking around saving water is still the norm.

Dairies and breweries tend to focus intensively on water cycles, purification, reuse and finding ways to reduce water consumption. Economic and market pressures demand more innovation to further drive greater impact.

Other industries face a different reality. In the chemical industry, water is used in large quantities as a process and cooling medium. In pharmaceutical applications, purity, safety and active ingredient residue can make reuse difficult. In mining, a wastewater stream can become a dual resource if valuable raw materials can be recovered along with the water. Municipal water management, on the other hand, does not optimize individual production lines but must ensure the supply and disposal of water for entire regions.

Despite these differences, fundamental process steps are common to all of them: separating, purifying, treating, measuring and closing loops. What fluctuates: material flows, quality requirements, regulations and economic pressures. For example, purification and reuse expertise from the food industry can be applied to pharmaceutical processes if purity requirements permit. And treatment technology that recovers water and raw materials in mining is relevant for the chemical industry, where similar separation processes are required.

GEA works at this intersection, applying its expertise in separation, cleaning and treatment technologies across the dairy, brewery, chemicals, pharmaceutical and mining industries.

A water-efficient industry does not mean “zero water”

The EU has explicitly linked water security to competitiveness and industrial resilience. By 2030, it aims to improve water efficiency across Europe by at least ten percent.

For industry, that does not mean using as little water as possible at any cost. It means knowing where water is needed, at what quality, how it can be recovered – and whether the overall balance of water, energy, infrastructure and local conditions still adds up.

Because in the end, water efficiency is not about chasing the lowest number of liters. It is about using the right amount of water in the right place, with the greatest value for the business, the environment and the communities sharing the same resource.