Orion withdraws all the water it consumes from municipal water supplies. The Group’s consumption of tap water has increased over the past years. It should be noted that due to the nature of facilities, there are significant differences in the water consumption volumes between Orion’s operating locations and facilities. Fermion’s water consumption has increased consequence of technical process changes, which at the same time reduce the use of solvents. Fermion also uses a lot of water for cooling its processes.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing uses batch processes, and the operations must meet very strict purity requirements. The process equipment and lines are carefully cleaned with water after the manufacture of each batch so that no traces of any substances used in the previous batch are left behind. Thus, along with growing production volumes also the consumption of water increases. Water is also used in the manufacture of liquid solutions.

At the Turku plant, water consumption increased significantly due to the deployment of the new gas scrubbers in 2008. They were an important environmental investment reducing VOC (volatile organic compound) emissions radically. Although the scrubbers consume a lot of water, they also capture evaporated solvents efficiently.