In its new annual corporate sustainability report, Catalyst for a Better World, Ecolab Inc. (ECL) highlights how it helps customers reduce water and energy use, ensure clean hospitals, hotels and restaurants, and safely produce the world’s food and energy.

“Many companies have complex sustainability needs and aspirations,” said Emilio 

Tenuta, vice president of Corporate Sustainability. “Our industry-leading expertise and solutions help them reduce water and energy use for everything from industrial water boilers and cooling towers to warewashing processes for restaurants and foodservice facilities. All of these individual interventions add up to a significant global impact.”

In 2017, Ecolab helped customers at nearly three million locations in 170 countries:

• Save more than 171 billion gallons of water, equivalent to the annual drinking water needs of 590 million people.

• Save more than 12 trillion BTUs of energy, reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 1.4 billion pounds.

• Prevent more than one million foodborne illnesses and reduce the risk of hospital-acquired infections for as many as 10,000 people

• Safely produce 25 percent of the world’s processed food, serve 45 billion restaurant meals, clean more than 800 million hotel rooms and generate more than 20 percent of the world’s power.

The 2017 sustainability report offers extensive case studies highlighting Ecolab’s work with several global customers. Among other highlights:

• Ecolab subsidiary Nalco Water installed its 3D TRASAR™ water management technology at a Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Chicago, saving the facility 23 million gallons in just four months.

• The same technology saved a Samsung semiconductor plant in Austin, Texas, 73.8 million gallons of water, along with $1.6 million in avoided maintenance costs.

• Hotel chain Marriott used a variety of Ecolab technologies to save 882 million gallons of water and 114 kilowatt hours of electricity, while avoiding 21,500 metric tons of CO2 emissions and two million pounds of waste, in one year.

• At a Kraft Heinz plant in California, Ecolab installed 3D TRASAR™ Clean-in-Place technology, providing continuous monitoring of the facility’s cleaning and sanitizing performance to help prevent potential food safety issues and reduce wash time by more than 2,000 hours.

• An Egyptian Fertilizers Company plant adopted the company’s PURATE™ technology, a system that controls biologic growth in cooling towers and other industrial water treatment facilities, to save 192,000 cubic meters of freshwater annually, equivalent to the annual drinking water needs of 175,300 people.

Within its own operations, Ecolab is working to reduce water withdrawals by 25 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by 2020, against a 2015 baseline. In 2017, the company moved to a new headquarters building in St. Paul, Minn., helping to reduce electricity use nearly 40 percent compared to the annualized use from 2012 to 2016.

Ecolab also aims conserve 300 billion gallons of water, equivalent to the drinking water needs of one billion people, by 2030. The company will accomplish this by reducing water use within its customers’ and its own operations. Ecolab supports the U.N.’s sustainable development goal six, promoting clean water and sanitation, through its work with customers, within its own facilities and through a number of dedicated projects in communities around the world.

Ecolab’s 2017 Corporate Sustainability Report was developed in alignment with the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) G4 core guidelines. The report summary and complete GRI Index are available at http://www.Ecolab.com/Sustainability.

Source: Ecolab News