Every day is Earth Day at Mosaic

Small Changes Result in Significant Water Wins for Mosaic’s North America Business

At Mosaic, we’re living the values of Earth Day every day.

In 2020, we established 12 bold targets to drive our performance; one of which included reducing our freshwater use by 20 percent per tonne of product by 2025.

Water plays a vital role in the mining and manufacturing processes necessary to produce phosphate crop nutrients. It is the lifeblood of local communities and ecosystems as well as our global food supply.

Water is essential. And it is finite.

Globally, water is the largest limiting factor to growing more food. For businesses and industries like Mosaic, water-related threats such as scarcity, flooding and climate change can increase food costs and disrupt supply chains.

Just as Mosaic is committed to helping the world grow the food it needs, we are equally committed to being a responsible steward of the environment.

Improved water management practices have made Mosaic the single largest contributor to reductions in permitted groundwater withdrawals within the Southwest Florida Water Management District’s operating area.

In 2021, we challenged our North America employees to think differently about water use. More awareness of the small, everyday changes they could make to save water resulted in some significant water wins.

Wingate for the win!

It has been an incredible year for Wingate’s freshwater use reduction project, as it has overcome some remarkable challenges while still managing to reduce its freshwater use per ton by 32% from its baseline year in 2015.

The project started to really take shape in May 2021, when Wingate began utilizing marine (re-use) water for the acid wash water supply. Previously it had been using deep well water for this activity and this change alone resulted in a significant reduction of in site freshwater usage. A similar approach was taken with the amine circuit water supply in September and Wingate saw another dramatic reduction in freshwater usage.

Following these changes in mid 2021, the remaining four months of the year saw an average freshwater use reduction of 62%, from 218,832 to 82,216 gallons per run hour at the float plant. Wingate predicts that if these reduction trends continue in 2022, that the site will reduce its total usage by up to 1 billion gallons per year.