Mr. Fallight Xu, Manager Sustainability Services of TÜV Rheinland, has been elected as a Technical Committee member of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS). He joins a team of experts representing the interests of various stakeholder groups. Their directive is to provide balanced stakeholder oversight of matters relating to the integrity and quality control of the water stewardship system. The AWS technical committee is responsible for reviewing and approving changes to the AWS standards, verification processes, policies for trademark use by third parties, guidance materials and policy documents.

AWS is a membership-based NGO formed in 2008 by The Nature Conservancy and The Pacific Institute for Water Stewardship, Australia to promote good water stewardship. In April 2014, AWS published the first International Water Stewardship Standards to define a set of criteria and indicators for how water should be stewarded at the site and catchment level in a way that is environmentally, socially, and economically beneficial. The standards provide water stewards with a six-step continual improvement framework that enables sites to commit to, understand, plan, implement, evaluate and communicate water stewardship actions.

TÜV Rheinland is an accredited conformity assessment body under the AWS standards system. It provides third party assessments for standards implementers to demonstrate their conformity with the AWS International Water Stewardship Standards. In 2015, TÜV Rheinland certified Ecolab’s Taicang plant, the first ever business case of AWS certification in the world. Since then, the Taicang plant has been working closely with the AWS and the WWF to promote the implementation of AWS standards in industrial parks.

Reference: http://www.allianceforwaterstewardship.org