Tom Ruonala - Uniline Australia
I am writing to let you know what Uniline has been doing since water has become a major issue in South East Queensland. In late 2005 when a water shortage was highlighted as a serious possibility, we began to examine the way in which Uniline was handling water in its production processes. It elevated the issue of water from just a purely cost of doing business to something that we needed to address as a responsible manufacturing business. Up until then we had only thought of water as a necessary cost of doing business and it was not a major cost to Uniline so there was not much effort spent on innovative practices.
During the 2005/2006 financial year Uniline used 13.728 Mega litres. Since that time we have begun recycling water from the output of on process into an emission scrubbing process and for use in general clean-up of another production process. Previously these processes were independent water users. We have also installed a 22Kilolitre water tank to capture runoff and also to store the recycled water. We have plans to install some more rainwater tanks to capture the runoff from more of our 14,000 square metres of roof. We have also renewed our cooling towers to ensure they are not using excessive amounts of water.
Our water usage has now dropped to 11.256 Mega litres which is a reduction of 18 per cent already. Towards the end of 2006 we re-evaluated the process water we used and we expect some more significant reductions for our next water usage invoice.
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