The circular economy is an industrial system designed for recovery and regeneration to replace “end of life” with “recovery" in order to turn waste into resources and thereby achieve waste reduction. By constantly implementing the circular economy, we implement water conservation and drainage reduction through improvement programs to reclaim and recycle valuable water resources for reuse and set the annual water conservation target at “1%". The actual achieved water-saving rate for 2025 was 6.60%. The boundary of water resource and effluent management is the Kaohsiung Plant, with data coverage of 100%.

In terms of water stress distributions, based on the water stress by country in the ‘Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas’ published by the World Resources Institute (WRI), the water stress of Taiwan falls at the low to medium level, with water stress at 10-20%.

According to the 2024 water resources statistics recently published in official statistical reports by the Water Resources Agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Kaohsiung City's water consumption was 1,033,070 million liters, with domestic and public water use at 361,330 million liters, industrial water use at 264,000 million liters, and agricultural water use at 407,740 million liters. In 2025, the Total withdrawal of USI's Kaohsiung Plant was 927.735 million liters, representing approximately 0.09% of Kaohsiung City's total water consumption. The water source for USI's Kaohsiung Plant is utility tap water, primarily supplied by the Pingding Water Treatment Plant and Chengcing Lake Water Treatment Plant. It is applied to product manufacturing process water, equipment cooling water for manufacturing operations, boiler water, domestic water for factory colleagues, and other uses. The Total withdrawal in 2024 was 938.423 million liters, and the water intake in 2025 decreased by approximately 10.7 million liters compared to 2024. The estimated reason is that there was a long shutdown period in November 2025 to carry out replacements of leaking pipelines that are normally difficult to repair, leading to a significant reduction in subsequent water consumption.