Don’t waste a drop: Innovation for water conservation

This is the final case study in our series of interviews with the winners of our first Water Breakthrough Challenge before we announce the winners of the Catalyst stream of Breakthrough 2. Read on to discover two projects helping conserve our most precious resource – water.

Last year, the head of the Environment Agency warned that a lack of water is an ‘existential threat’ facing the UK. Climate change is a major driver of this, with the Met Office predicting that some parts of the UK could see as much as 60% less summer rainfall. This increasingly scarce resource will be stretched further by population growth, particularly in England and Wales, where population is expected to grow by 3.5% and 2.6% by mid-2030, respectively (compared to 2% for Northern Ireland, and 0.3% for Scotland).

All of this means that we need to think differently about how we process, store and use water, whether that’s in our homes, workplaces or industries. Two winners of our inaugural Water Breakthrough Challenge are looking at exactly this issue, exploring innovative techniques to help us make the most of every drop – read on for more information.

The National Infrastructure Commission has estimated that new water supplies equivalent to the water consumed by over nine million people would be needed by the mid 2030’s. Water companies have proposed some large regional projects to increase water supplies, supported by regulators, but there is a need for more flexible, local options too.

This initiative, led by Bristol Water with their academic and industry partners, will develop a pilot plant to explore more localised options for water supply. Distributed water schemes like this have the potential to alleviate water shortages during periods of drought, reacting more quickly to rapid changes in demand while greatly reducing the carbon emissions required to pump water from one region to another. Household and retail water customers also stand to benefit, with decreased infrastructure and transport costs and additional competition potentially driving down bills.

In 2021, the Environment Agency classified many parts of England as ‘seriously water stressed’, an issue likely to be exacerbated by population growth. Affinity Water, who are leading this initiative, have seen an annual population increase of close to 180,000 – this represents an increase in demand of close to 25 million litres per day (or as much as 10 Olympic swimming pools).

Affinity Water will work with their partners in the infrastructure, development and technology sectors to develop the world’s first ‘water neutral’ housing developments, delivering 3000 new homes across the southeast of England without increasing the overall water use in the community. This will be achieved by bringing together a number of water saving devices, from water saving toilets, to rainwater tanks and greywater recycling units. To help promote the implementation of water neutral developments, Affinity Water will be publishing anonymised data from all three of their trial sites, and preparing a ‘water neutrality blueprint’, documenting everything they’ve learned over the course of the project.

As well as preserving water resources in the region, this approach will save customers on their water and energy bills, and reduce emissions of climate-change causing gases required to supply water to customers.