Waupaca Foundry is committed to the wellbeing of not only the communities in which we operate but the sustainability of our world as well. World Water Day aims to raise awareness about the importance of water management. At Waupaca Foundry, water is a crucial part of our operations in our overall casting process and our ability to cool running machinery. To combat our high water usage, though, we implemented a forward agenda to increase water sustainability.
 
The journey began in 2010 when Waupaca Foundry set sights on a 10-year, company-wide sustainability plan that included reducing water use consumption by 80 percent.
 
In 2011, our Marinette, Wisconsin location installed a closed-loop cooling water system to help reduce water cooling demands and recycle non-contact cooling water to be used in future machine cooling water operations.
 
 
The plant’s once average usage of 750,000 gallons of water per day is now all recovered and reused, resulting in a 30 to 95 percent reduction of cooling water needed and a savings of 225,000 to 712,500 gallons of daily water usage. 
 
The system has since been implemented at our Waupaca Wisconsin; Tell City, Indiana, and Etowah, Tennessee locations. At each of these plants, the closed-loop cooling water system has cut plant cooling water demand by 80 percent, if not more, and non-contact cooling water discharges have been reduced to near zero. 
 
In light of an expansion project on our Plant 1 facility in 2017, six new warmbox machines were installed on the closed-loop cooling water system, which saves an estimated 50,000 gallons of water per day — or 15 million gallons of water annually.
 
Additionally, because of Waupaca Foundry’s plant improvements, contaminated process water that once required wastewater treatment and discharge has been eliminated at all Waupaca Foundry locations.
 
Since the implementation of our 10-year sustainability plan measured through 2018, Waupaca Foundry has improved overall water consumption use by 65.5 percent. This percentage includes a usage decrease of 304.5 million gallons of water from an annual usage of 849.5 million gallons of water in 2014 to 509 million gallons in 2018.
 
To learn more about Waupaca Foundry’s water conservation efforts, see our commitment to water sustainability.