Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting has moved from a nice-to-have to a boardroom priority for commercial real estate owners and operators. If your building is pursuing sewer credits, you may not realize that you’re simultaneously building the data infrastructure that ESG frameworks demand. The connection between sewer credits and ESG reporting is more direct than most people think.
What ESG Frameworks Want From Your Water Data
Major ESG reporting frameworks — including GRESB (the benchmark for real estate sustainability), CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), and the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) — all include water consumption metrics as core indicators. Specifically, they want to know your total water withdrawal by source, your water consumption (water withdrawn minus water discharged), your water intensity (consumption per square foot or per unit of revenue), and what measures you’re taking to reduce water consumption.
For a commercial building with cooling towers, the submetering data you collect for sewer credit applications provides exactly the granular data these frameworks require. You already know your total makeup water volume, your evaporation losses, and your blowdown volume — the three components needed to calculate accurate water consumption metrics.
From Billing Adjustment to Sustainability Metric
The infrastructure behind a sewer credit program — submeters, real-time monitoring, documented water balance calculations — generates a continuous stream of verified water data. This data serves your ESG reporting in several ways. First, it demonstrates that your building has invested in measurement infrastructure, which ESG evaluators view favorably. Vague estimates of water consumption score poorly; metered, documented data scores well.
Second, optimizing your cooling tower for sewer credits — maximizing cycles of concentration, reducing drift, detecting leaks — actually reduces total water consumption, not just sewer charges. A tower running at 5 cycles of concentration instead of 3 uses roughly 20 percent less total water. That’s a real reduction you can report.
Third, the trend data from continuous monitoring shows improvement over time — the narrative ESG frameworks value most. A GRESB submission showing declining water intensity year over year is far more compelling than a single-year snapshot.
GRESB and the Real Estate Connection
GRESB is particularly relevant for commercial property owners because institutional investors increasingly use GRESB scores to evaluate real estate portfolio sustainability. Water management is a significant component of the GRESB assessment — covering both consumption metrics and management practices. The EPA’s WaterSense program aligns with GRESB’s water assessment criteria, and buildings that have implemented WaterSense-recommended practices (including submetering and monitoring) score well on the water portion of the GRESB benchmark.
A building with an active sewer credit program can report documented water withdrawal and discharge volumes (from submeter data), water efficiency measures (optimized cycles of concentration, leak detection, drift reduction), investment in monitoring infrastructure (meters, sensors, cloud platforms), and quantified financial savings from water management — demonstrating that sustainability and profitability align.
Practical Steps
If your building is already pursuing sewer credits, leveraging that data for ESG reporting requires minimal additional effort. Ensure your monitoring system exports data in formats compatible with your ESG reporting platform. Establish a water baseline year against which you’ll measure improvement. Document all water efficiency measures implemented alongside your credit program. And track both absolute water consumption and water intensity metrics over time.
The Department of Energy’s cooling tower management guidance provides the technical foundation for water efficiency measures that satisfy both credit programs and ESG reporting requirements.
Ready to Find Out What You Could Save?
RPM Water Equity Solutions helps commercial facilities recover money lost to sewer billing assumptions. If your building has cooling towers, you may be paying sewer charges on water that never reaches the sewer system.
Request your free assessment today and find out how much you could recover.
One Program, Two Payoffs
Sewer credits save you money today. ESG reporting protects and enhances your property’s value tomorrow. The metering and monitoring infrastructure serves both purposes simultaneously — reducing your utility costs while generating the verified sustainability data that investors, tenants, and regulators increasingly demand. If you’re already doing the work for sewer credits, make sure you’re capturing the ESG value too.
