SP Workshop on Advancing Water Reuse Across the Automotive Value Chain
Suppliers Partnership for the Environment (SP) recently convened automakers, suppliers and environmental service providers to explore practical opportunities to advance water reuse across the automotive value chain.
The July 2026 workshop was an early milestone in SP’s work leading Action 5.15 under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Reuse Action Plan 2.0. The discussion built on a pre-workshop survey of SP members and focused on the barriers limiting broader adoption of water reuse and the resources or collaborative actions that could help address them.
Participants identified building a positive business case as the most consistent barrier. They also emphasized that water reuse opportunities are highly dependent on location, water risk, infrastructure, process requirements and local regulatory conditions.
The resulting executive summary outlines several potential areas for future SP action, including:
- Strengthening the business case for water reuse
- Developing case studies and benchmarking
- Improving access to risk information, technical expertise and implementation resources
- Expanding peer and cross-sector learning
- Evaluating policy and infrastructure barriers
- Supporting demonstrations of emerging technologies
These findings will help inform the development of SP’s next-phase work to make water reuse easier for automotive companies and suppliers to evaluate, justify and implement.