Water is an essential and precious resource – however, climate change is exacerbating water stress and scarcity in many parts of the world. We treat water with the care it deserves, aiming to reduce our water consumption and protect local water sources for future generations.
Water is critical to our business. It’s the main ingredient in our products, essential to our manufacturing processes and critical to ensuring a sustainable supply of the agricultural ingredients we depend upon.
Water is also one of the world’s most precious resources, however climate change is exacerbating water stress and water scarcity in many parts of the world. We are witnessing water shortages, droughts and floods in regions where we produce our products or source our ingredients.
To address water scarcity and water quality challenges, we adopt a value chain approach to water stewardship, focusing on water efficiency within our own operations and working to protect the future sustainability of the water sources that our business, our communities and our suppliers rely upon.
We’re focused on reducing the water we use in our production facilities. We also aim to return 100% of our wastewater safely to nature, and replenish 100% of the water we use in areas of water stress.
Our actions support UN Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation.
With the support of The Coca-Cola Foundation, we will be able to restore biotopes such as fens and wet heath in order to return unique plants and animals to nature.
Filip Hebbrecht
Responsible Partnerships at Natuurpoint
Our commitments
- Water reduction
- Water protection
- Water replenishment
We’ll reduce the water we use in manufacturing by 20% - and address water impacts in our supply chain.
We aim to make our production facilities as water efficient as possible and we measure performance through our water use ratio.
We monitor our company-wide water use, setting annual targets and identifying opportunities to reduce our consumption.
We’re continuing to invest in water saving systems to make our manufacturing and cleaning processes more water efficient.
We’ll protect the sustainability of the water sources we use for future generations.
To help protect our water sources, all of our production facilities carry out source water vulnerability assessments (SVAs) every five years.
We ensure that 100% of our wastewater is safely returned to nature. Before water is discharged from any of our manufacturing sites, we apply the highest standards of treatment.
We’ll replenish 100% of the water we use in our beverages
Together with The Coca-Cola Company, we continue to replenish the water we use in areas of water stress in partnership with local NGOs and community groups.
In 2021, together with TCCC, we managed 22 community based water replenishment projects in Europe. As a result, we were able to replenish 226% of the water we sourced to make our drinks in areas affected by water stress. We also managed six projects in API, replenishing 320%.
Our progress in 2022
Our stories
Project Catalyst, a collaboration between The Coca-Cola Foundation, sugar cane farmers in Queensland, Australia, WWF Australia, natural resource management bodies and the Federal Government, aims to reduce the agricultural run-off impacting the Great Barrier Reef. Since 2009, the initiative has grown to include more than 130 farmers, improving the quality of 150 billion litres of water flowing into the reef and reducing run-off by 180 tonnes per year.
In Spain, in partnership with WWF and The Coca-Cola Foundation, we continue to support Misión Posible: Desafío Guadalquivir. The project aims to improve the irrigation of agricultural crops and enhance the biodiversity of the Guadalquivir River by restoring local marshland. Thanks to this project, 633 million litres of water were returned to nature in 2021. In total, we replenished 3.7 billion litres of water across the eight water replenishment projects in 2021.
In Belgium, we will save up to six million litres of water a year by using new vacuum pump fillers for beverage filling processes that we introduced at our production facility in Antwerp in 2021.