Working towards a water wise world at Allia

It’s World Water Week 2018  – a growing global event to address the world’s water sustainability issues.

At Allia, we’re committed to aligning our work with Sustainability Development Goal (SDG) 6 – the holistic water goal that World Water Week looks to make progress towards.

Allia, together with Cambridge Cleantech, who are a tenant at our Cambridge Future Business Centre, are involved in SCALE UP – an EU funded project that brings together a number of cleantech clusters from across Europe to support SMEs in accessing corporate supply chains. As part of this, we’re working with Anglian Water to deliver Water Connect, where companies can pitch their innovation or emerging technology solution, learn about the key challenges and opportunities at Anglian Water and meet with their technical experts to forge new collaborations.

Our Future Business Centre in Cambridge is rated as BREEAM excellent, meaning it meets the highest environmental standards. Innovative rainwater harvesting technology has been implemented on the toilets at our Cambridge centre, helping us to reuse natural resources and conserve water in a sustainable way. A water leak detection unit is also fitted at this centre, ensuring that our facilities manager is alerted to any leaks that may occur, allowing them to be fixed in a timely manner to manage water waste.

At our Peterborough Future Business Centre, the Grow café was one of the first outlets in the city to sign up to the Refill app, which allows members of the public to fill up their water bottles with tap water for free, with the aim of reducing plastic waste. World Water Week lists plastic pollution as a growing concern, and one of the five trends that are shaping this year’s event. When we reduce plastic waste and pollution, we also reduce needless water consumption – one standard plastic bottle alone takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture.

It’s not just our Future Business Centres that aim to reduce water waste and address water-related issues. A number of our centre’s tenants, plus ventures and entrepreneurs on our Serious Impact programme are working towards a more water wise world:

• Bluetap, an incubatee on our Serious Impact programme, creates products to improve access to high quality drinking water in low resource settings. In the UK, Bluetap sell reusable, sustainable water bottles, and have recently partnered with the University of Cambridge. Profits from the sale of the water bottles go towards the organisation’s development work in Uganda.
• Majico recently graduated from the Serious Impact accelerator programme and provide developing communities with sustainable water treatment technologies.
• AmaElla produce sustainable lingerie and champion the slow fashion movement. All of Amaella’s products are made using certified organic cotton, the production of which conserves water and uses rain water more efficiently.
• KisanHub has created a crop intelligence platform that enables enterprises to manage their crops. 70% of all water usage in the world is used in agriculture, and 50% of this is wasted – KisanHub’s platform provides farmers with valuable tools to improve efficiencies with less input, and thus reduce water waste.

No matter where you live or work, there’s plenty all of us can do to contribute to World Water Week and water sustainability in general. Just being more conscious of how much water is used to make the products we consume in our everyday lives – from cutting down on plastic (it takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture one standard plastic bottle), to changing our diets slightly for initiatives like ‘Meat Free Monday’ (to produce just one pound of beef takes 1,799 gallons of water). There are always small changes to be made, and together they can make a big difference.

Allia aligns itself with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This supports: