Reducing the water used for testing at our Bangladesh laboratory

07 Aug 2024

In recent years, Intertek Bangladesh has introduced several significant measures to reduce the water footprint of its laboratory in the country’s capital Dhaka. The latest of these, aimed at recycling water from the site’s dry cleaning machine, will save 6.7 million litres from sewage each year.

The appearance of textiles and clothes after dry cleaning is one of the common tests we perform for our Softlines customers. To conduct these tests, we use a dry cleaning machine that requires water for cooling. This process involves absorbing heat through a heat exchanger and then draining the hot water. In its continued search for more sustainable practices, our Dhaka team found that the hot water from the heat exchanger could be reused.

The team utilised the site’s 100,000-litre fire reserve tank, having conducted a feasibility study and confirming that there would be no effect on the fire system. It then created a closed-loop system, connecting the heat exchanger to the reserve tank and adding an overhead tank which now supplies the 26 litres of water per minute previously drained to sewage back to the dry cleaning machine.  

The initiative, which the local team has named AquaCycle, joins other successful water reduction projects at our Dhaka laboratory, including a rainwater harvesting system and the reuse of treated water for gardening.