Managing water in operations

Nestlé will leverage areas of direct control over its own manufacturing operations

Nestlé Ghana Civil Engineer Joseph Ayippey (right), discusses best practice in waste water processing with his colleagues at the Agbara, Nigeria, plant. Joseph will use this knowledge in the construction of Nestlé Ghana’s new waste water processing plant at Tema. In its operations, Nestlé uses water in similar ways as consumers do in the kitchen: for washing raw materials, cooking, extracting and cooling, and cleaning equipment. Treating this water before returning it back to nature has been part of operating Nestlé factories for many decades. As early as 1929 and 1932, the Vittel (France) and Maggi (Switzerland) were the first to construct municipal waste water or biological waste treatment plants. This approach was followed whenever Nestlé built a new factory in other parts of the world, often long before local legislation existed. As a result, our waste water treatment facilities are frequently considered as model installations by authorities and visited by thousands of specialists. Most recent examples include installations in Morocco, Iran, and Colombia.

With water scarcity becoming a major concern, our focus is to reduce the amount of water needed in our operations, e.g. the total volume of water used by Nestlé factories dropped from 218 billion litres in 1998, to 155 billion in 2006, despite a significant increase in the quantity of products manufactured. Saving water is especially important in water-stressed areas, e.g. the Nescafé factory close to Bangkok, where all efforts were made to minimise water use and maximise recycling of water streams using the most modern technologies. In 2006, more than 100 factories reduced their total water usage by our corporate target of 3% or more water savings per ton of product per year. Environmental officer, Xu DeGui, shows dairy farmers the Shuangcheng factory waste water treatment facility. Every weekday, around 30 local farmers learn new farming techniques at the experimental farm attached to the factory.