DALLAS — As drought conditions rage across many areas of the country, AT&T and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) unveiled today a suite of tools that U.S. commercial buildings can use to collectively save up to 28 billion gallons of water annually, equivalent to the amount of water that more than 765,000 Americans use at home in a given year. Buildings with cooling towers typically use 28 percent of their daily water use for cooling, and they have the opportunity to reduce that water demand by 14-40 percent with this toolkit.
The Building Water Efficiency toolkit, available at www.edf.org/attwater, is the result of data and lessons from pilot projects that ran across the U.S. during the summer and fall of 2012. It gives organizations simple, cost-effective resources to build their own water efficiency programs and includes both technical and management tools to design, implement and document water savings. The combination of tools can be used to create the business case for investments in efficient water management.
“People knew these cooling systems use a lot of energy, but nobody had ever focused on how much water they guzzle, or how we could reduce that ‘aqua-print’,” said Tom Murray, Vice President of Corporate Partnerships at EDF. “Even we were surprised by what we were able to achieve with AT&T. It’s a huge opportunity for companies to save water, save money and help out the communities where they operate.”
For its own operations, AT&T identified water savings opportunities of 14-40 percent per pilot facility and did so in a way that also made business sense. One cooling tower filtration system upgrade costs less than $100,000 to install but promises more than $60,000 in annual water and sewer savings—paying for itself in less than two years, and a minor $4,000 equipment upgrade to expand free air cooling promises nearly $40,000 in annual savings. These savings—deployed company-wide—add up. Through free air cooling and optimized cooling towers, AT&T aims to reduce its approximately 1 billion gallon annual cooling tower water use by 150 million gallons per year by 2015. Cooling tower water use accounts for approximately 30 percent of AT&T’s 3.3 billion gallons of annual water use.
“Thirty-one of our top water consuming facilities are in water stressed regions,” explained John Schinter, AT&T Executive Director of Energy. “We couldn’t wait until a drought put a strain on our operations; we needed to manage risk from water scarcity and increasing water costs today. EDF helped us find ways to do so that were good for the communities where we operate and that were financially sound.”’
To further its water efforts and collaboration with EDF, AT&T is hosting EDF Climate Corps fellows for the fourth summer in a row. One fellow is focused exclusively on continuing to realize water and energy savings from free air cooling, while another fellow is helping with a regional outreach program to share the tools and findings with organizations in water stressed areas.
AT&T remains committed to sustainability and was recently ranked #1 on Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s13th Annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List. AT&T was also included in the 2012 Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index. Visit www.att.com/csr to learn more about sustainability at AT&T.