Our industrial market encompasses numerous services to help our clients meet their business goals for sustainability, efficiency, and success. We provide guidance, evaluation, and implementation of projects that directly and positively impact the community and environment. In 2017, we set a goal to establish a process to collect environmental, social, and governance statistics on our projects by 2020. As we assess this data and seek to better understand project impacts going forward, we are reflecting on some new processes and information and sharing the impact made for our industrial clients with a specific focus on wastewater and remediation.
Guidance and action on wastewater improvements
Every industry must find efficient, affordable ways to treat and reclaim or discharge wastewater. Last year, we worked with several clients across different industries to provide detailed evaluations, designs, and construction of systems to help them meet their water goals. We implemented projects resulting in biogas generation, energy optimization, and air quality improvements. The most comprehensive statistic we collected in 2020 was for water recycling and contaminant removal. Aside from implementing new systems and facilities, we conducted a number of water recycling evaluations – six resulting in a combined 0.8 million gallons per day total of water savings.
Concurrently, keeping industrial wastewater clean and at the highest quality is of utmost importance. in addition to several contaminant removal evaluations, we built two systems that will result in over 2,000 pounds per day of biological oxygen demand (BOD) removal, 7,000 pounds per day of chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal, and 2,000 pounds per day of total suspended solids (TSS) removal.
Sustainable remediation
Our site remediation follows a comprehensive approach to foster personalized solutions, targeting desired outcomes, and managing risk throughout the project. In 2020, we helped clients remove pollutants from their sites and collected key data in the process. Our work with remediation clients, not including our Operations & Management clients, successfully treated a total 163 million gallons of groundwater from 15 projects across seven states. In addition to removing PFAS, 1,4-dioxane, and Trichloroethylene (TCE) at our remediation treatment system sites, we also removed over 1,500 pounds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at eight treatment system sites.
While the outcomes of these projects matter, we also understand that through our effort to deliver a sustainable design, we can make a greater impact. In 2020, we also evaluated the application of greener cleanup best management practices (BMPs) across all remediation projects. While voluntary, implementing greener cleanup BMPs is integral to our remediation work and encouraged amongst our site cleanup team. The charts below provide an overview of the BMPs implemented in our projects. We estimate a total 504 BMPs implemented across 27 projects last year. These efforts have direct impact on the Environmental Projection Agency’s five core greener cleanup elements including water, energy, air, materials and waste, and land and ecosystems.
Want to learn more about our impacts?
This is simply an overview of the impacts we made with our industrial clients. To discover more in-depth information and examples of how we’re furthering positive environmental, social, and economic change, visit Industrial Wastewater, Remediation, and Environmental Health & Safety to learn more and connect with our experts.
