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.
Our progress toward improving water use efficiency in our operations
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. We promote recycling and reusing water where possible, and 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.
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 Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) certification process 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 2025. By the end of 2023, we had reached 23 out of a total of 44.
