Water and industry

The history of industrial development has been built in partnership with water. Factories have always been built along the water's edge (river, canal, sea) for a variety of reasons:

• convenience of transporting raw materials and finished products, as well as disposing of by-products or waste generated during manufacturing processes;

• water to perform a wide range of industrial tasks.

Water combines an exceptional range of physical and chemical properties: it can become a solvent, a thermal fluid or simply an easy-to-handle liquid. This explains why water is involved in most industrial processes.