A person floating in water and smiling.

Safe and
Clean Water

Clean water is essential not just for life itself, but for making sure we can live high-quality, enjoyable lives. Climate change and the growing global population mean that ensuring everyone has access to this most precious of resources is one of our biggest challenges.

Our water handprint

Kemira serves water-intensive industries, and our solutions help make more clean, safe water available to everyone. We call this our water handprint. We do this in three main ways.

Firstly, through our work with cities’ and municipalities’ water treatment plants, we help ensure citizens have access to the clean, safe, and affordable drinking water they need for a healthy life.

Secondly, we help municipalities and industries ensure that discharged wastewater meets environmental permit standards, reducing the load on local water bodies.

Thirdly, we help water-intensive industries use less water and make their processes more sustainable, for example by enabling them to use recycled water rather than freshwater in their processes.

Kemira is committed to the CEO Water Mandate, advancing best practices in water stewardship.

Our water footprint

In our own operations, we are continuously evaluating opportunities to decrease water withdrawal, consumption, discharge, and associated impacts through water recycling and reuse. This includes process redesign and optimization projects in our upgraded and new production lines.

With about 90% of total water withdrawal, Kemira’s manufacturing processes require water primarily for cooling purpose. It can be discharged back to the environment without any further treatment required.

Kemira’s target is to continuously improve freshwater use intensity. Fresh water use intensity is defined as m3 water withdrawn minus cooling water use per ton of production. Baseline is 2019 at 1.9 m3 per metric tonnes of production. Fresh water use intensity in 2023 was 1.3 m3 per metric tonnes of production.

Kemira’s new water target is to improve water management to Leadership level based on CDP Water Security scoring methodology by the end of 2025.

Do you drink water from your tap?

Ensuring clean water and sanitation for all – this is what Kemira is truly committed to. Wido Waelput, who leads Kemira’s Water business in EMEA, talks about his own passion for clean water.

2023 Overview of water flows (megaliters)

GRI 303-3

74,056

Water withdrawal

GRI 303-4

68,885

Water discharge

GRI 303-5

5,171

Water consumption

Insights