Articles

Thirsty Industries

The factories, mines and plants behind the numbers, and the water that runs through them.

Behind every product on the Thirsty list is a plant, and the plant is where water becomes an engineering problem. A textile mill dyes with it, a tannery limes hides in it, a chip factory rinses silicon in water so pure it dissolves metal, a steelworks runs a river through the walls of its furnaces and gives it back warm. These articles go inside those plants.

Each one explains what the water is for, how much a factory takes and how much it keeps, and what comes out of the drain. The difference between water withdrawn and water consumed runs through the whole series: a power station on a river borrows an enormous flow and returns nearly all of it, while a cooling tower takes a fraction and sends it into the sky. Both numbers matter, to different people.

The industries here are the ones I have worked in and around, and the articles are written from the plant floor: what a good works does with its water, what a bad one does to its river, and how the better plants have learned to close the loop.