Kohler India Team Navigates a Sustainability Roadblock by Rethinking Everything
Our Jhagadia, India, plant now uses 1/6th the amount of water used at other Kohler faucet plants.
We Believe In Rethinking What We Do.
How do you reuse water sustainably? You use it to water the grass, of course. Well, not always, as our faucets team in India found out.
Plating faucets (meaning, adding the finish to them) requires a lot of rinsing to wash away impurities that affect quality. Much of this water can be treated and then reused, but some cannot. The agents used to treat the parts contain salts that are too fine to be removed.
Now you wouldn’t want to dump salt-ridden water on grass, right?
So the team members set out to do two things: (1) explore new ways of cleaning and (2) use less water and have less to dispose.
It took a lot of back-the-drawing-board work. Why do we have so much rinse water? Is there a way for us to monitor the water differently? Basically, why do we do it this way?
Well, their efforts paid off. They reduced their water usage to 1/6th of what is used at other Kohler faucet facilities.
And that pesky salt? Through investigation, they implemented new treatment techniques and controls so that the water could be used to irrigate trees and vegetation around the site.
Now that is literally a green solution.
