I mentioned in response to an earlier question that we're scientists. We're engineers and Ph.D. scientists, every one of us. We affectionately call ourselves “the geek squad“. As we go about our daily business inside of COSIA, we often retreat back into scientific principles and that often means measurement. One of the mantras we use is, “If you don't measure it, you don't manage it.”
One of the things that we take great pains in is developing key performance indicators. How do you measure not only effort but also outcome? How many projects you're developing, how much money you spend, and how much technology is being shared, those are efforts. We measure outcome in two ways. One is the number of implementation decisions. Inside of COSIA the companies develop things and they share. They give away free use rights, but it's up to the companies to implement them. We don't measure exactly how and when the companies implement, but we do measure the formal decision the companies have made to implement a technology. That's when COSIA's responsibility stops. We can tell you, to date, that companies have made 347 implementation decisions based on the shared technologies.
Some of those technologies have been implemented; they're working right now in the plants. For some of them, because of the lead times, the actual implementation won't happen until some time into the future. These companies are very formal in their decision-making, and they make very clear decisions. They made 347 implementation decisions. We have not calculated our 2015 decisions yet, but we're doing that now.
The other outcome is determining what the actual environmental performance improvement is. The best statistics that we have early in our life history are that in situ producers have decreased their fresh water use by 36%, and miners have reduced it by 30%. We measure both effort and outcome, including an implementation metric.