What about industrial water sustainability?

Excerpt

Some have said that water will be in the 21st century what energy was in the 20th century, obviously referring to the issue of meeting adequate demand, availability, and safety issues of these resources for maintaining our living standards. It is true that the availability of fresh water is becoming increasingly a problem with time in many parts of the world, resulting from unsustainable withdrawals from surface and underground resources and from contamination making existing sources unfit. With respect to energy, however, the statement is indeed hyperbolic. If anything, concerns for energy availability will be even more enhanced, as evidenced by rapidly increasing demand and the rush to developing alternative sources of energy for both transportation and power needs all over the world. In the US about half of the water consumption is devoted to power generation, about a third for agriculture, and a relatively smaller amount, 5%, for industrial purposes. The bulk of the publicly or privately funded research on water technologies has been conducted to satisfy standards for municipal needs (11% of US water use), and the results of these studies are widely available publicly. The standards for municipal water are roughly similar everywhere. Industrial sectors, however, being many and of different types, technology needs are likewise varied. For instance the water quality needs of the textile dying industry are very different from those of the semiconductor processing industry. The effluents from these two sectors are also different, as are the technologies required to treat these effluents for reclamation purposes. …