Over the coming decades, the bulk of the world's predicted population growth is going to take place in urban areas that will serve as hotbeds for economic activity and innovation. Some estimate that just the world's city-dwelling population of 2050 will equal the entire global population of today.

Such rapid growth will of course strain natural resources and infrastructure, making it vital that the world's governments and companies make investments now that will pay dividends later.

This is the context that will serve as the backdrop of World Water Week, the annual event kicked off yesterday by the Stockholm International Water Institute. Experts from the civil, government and business sectors will meet to discuss the complexities surrounding water, including scarcity, sanitation, economics and ecosystems, among others. Expect a slew of studies and announcements to surface this week from the event, including an interesting story I'll bring to you on Wednesday about the research conducted by a major beverage company of the watersheds surrounding some of its facilities. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we've turned to some of the leading water experts in the business world to hear about how they are taking steps to reduce their companies' water footprints. The sheer scale of the water savings is impressive: Intel recycled 2 billion gallon of water last year, for example, while a simple process change may save as much as 16 million gallons of water at the average MillerCoors brewery.

These stories remind us that the opportunities to save water are both large and small. Do you have a great water-saving story from your company? We'd love to hear about it in the comments below.

Tom Cooper, Intel, Worldwide Water Program Manager

Since 1998, Intel has invested more than $100 million in water conservation programs at its global facilities. To date, the company’s comprehensive and aggressive efforts have saved nearly 40 billion gallons of water -- enough for roughly 370,000 U.S. homes for an entire year. Intel estimates that it takes 16 gallons of water to produce a single chip; by comparison, producing one pair of jeans takes 2,900 gallons, one hamburger takes 634 gallons, and one cup of tea takes 9 gallons.

Over time, the company has improved the efficiency of the process used to create the ultra-pure water (UPW) required to clean silicon wafers during fabrication. In the past, almost 2 gallons of water was needed to make 1 gallon of UPW, but today 1 gallon of UPW can be made from between 1.25 and 1.5 gallons of water. After UPW is used to clean wafers, the water is suitable for industrial purposes, irrigation, and many other needs. With this reuse strategy, Intel harvests as much water from its manufacturing processes as possible and directs it to equipment such as cooling towers and scrubbers. In 2010, Intel internally recycled approximately 2 billion gallons of water.

Neil Hawkins, Dow Chemical Company, Vice President, Sustainability & EH&S

Dow’s facility in Terneuzen, Netherlands, is the company’s second largest manufacturing site globally and, since February 2007, the site has been reusing municipal household wastewater to help preserve community water supplies and reduce demand for desalinated water in a water-stressed region.

Every day, Dow takes 2.6 million gallons of municipal wastewater and applies reverse osmosis technology to reuse the water twice. More than 70 percent of the wastewater is reused in manufacturing plants, and then used again in cooling towers before it is released into the atmosphere as steam. This purification process requires half the chemical treatment and 65 percent less energy than desalinating the same amount of sea water, and the energy savings are equivalent to lowering carbon dioxide emissions by 5,000 tons per year.

Michael Kobori, Levi Strauss & Co., Vice President, Social and Environmental Sustainability

As a company, Levi Strauss & Co. is working to build sustainability into everything we do, including reducing the water used throughout the lifecycle of our products. Based on our research, we know that we can reduce the most water by focusing on more sustainable cotton farming and by educating consumers about how they care for their products after they take them home.

We also wanted to make sure we are doing our part to reduce water in the part of the supply chain where we have more direct influence. Our Levi's ® brand designers challenged themselves to reduce the amount of water used during the finishing process for a pair of jeans from an average of 42 liters of water to as little as 1.5 liters. The result was the Water<Less collection, jeans with great style but made using significantly less water. We're expanding our Water<Less collection to even more styles and products around the world this Fall.

Kim Marotta, MillerCoors, Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility

Water efficiency is critical to our business, and we are focused on working towards our 2015 goal of reducing overall water usage by 15 percent. We're testing new innovations in our breweries to not only reduce water usage, but in some cases, replace water-based processes completely.

We recently conducted a trial of ionic air rinser technology at our Albany, Ga., brewery that uses ionized air to neutralize the charge on aluminum cans and remove any dust particles as they pass through the rinser. This is typically a water-intensive process, and has the potential to reduce water use by as much as 4 million gallons per filling line each year. The scale has great potential, as each MillerCoors brewery, on average, has at least four can lines. The pilot was successful and is still continuing. We're currently evaluating the ROI and the possibility of making the capital improvements needed to roll this out at other breweries, particularly those in water-scarce or stressed regions.