Water management in our operations

Water is fundamental to our operations, a vital resource for everyone and central to our efforts to build a more sustainable business. The need to improve water use in our factories was further highlighted by recent droughts around the globe.

We have implemented programs to continuously improve water use efficiency in our factories.

Our approach to water stewardship must be local and context based. We use various sets of publicly available data from four independent sources to evaluate the water stress at our factory locations. Each Nestlé site receives a score, allowing us to prioritize locations and actions.

Our context-based approach involves a three-step roadmap from local to wider catchment level: regulatory compliance as a minimum, followed by ‘excellence’ in water resources management, and then collective action across landscapes.

We perform regular assessments of local water resources and water use inside and outside our factories, including possible future risks. We also engage with stakeholders and monitor external research findings.

How we embed water stewardship in our operations

We constantly seek to improve water use efficiency in our factories, monitoring water withdrawals and water quality in all locations. Recycling and reusing water wherever feasible is a priority across our different sites, each of which has unique water requirements. We closely monitor the quality of the water we discharge. This due diligence approach guarantees regulatory compliance and provides a level of assurance that surrounding ecosystems and communities are preserved.

Our digital compliance assessment and monitoring tool provides further assurance that our factories meet the exacting standards of our Nestlé Environmental Requirements (NER) for water.

Safeguarding water with real-time insights

We always aim to use water in the most efficient ways possible. Since 2019, we have been using Aquassay technology in our bottled-water factories to monitor water from the source through to discharge. The technology helps factory managers highlight areas for improvement in real-time.

Collaborating with the Alliance for Water Stewardship for high water efficiency standards

The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard is the first global standard for measuring responsible water stewardship across social, environmental and economic criteria.

We are also committed to certifying all Nestlé Waters sites to the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard by the end of 2025. The AWS Standard helps sites adopt best practices to address the shared water challenges of a watershed. It also helps ensure responsible water stewardship actions for all stakeholders.

We contribute to the work of the AWS Technical Committee and Agriculture Working Group.

Alliance for Water Stewardship certification

The AWS certification process is rigorous and provides third-party verification for our water stewardship work. It enables broader, improved collaboration among local stakeholders. It promotes responsible water use that benefits local communities, socially and economically, while supporting the environmental sustainability of watersheds.

AWS certification also leads to a stronger understanding of local water challenges and more meaningful collective actions to address them – all vital to water resource management.

We aim to certify all our Nestlé Waters sites to the AWS Standard by the end of 2025. As of 2024, Nestlé Waters has 25 sites AWS certified.