‘Good Food, Good Life’ is the promise we make to billions of consumers around the world.
To fulfil that promise we ensure that our products and services are high quality and safe.
We recognise too, our responsibility to ensure that we use water as efficiently as possible.
Globally, withdrawals by industry, by agriculture and by communities are set to exceed supply by 40% by 2030, according to the 2030 Water Resources Group.
As the world’s largest food and beverage company, we can make a significant contribution to helping address this problem, not just in our factories but in our supply chains and in our other facilities too.
Each innovation is a step towards a more sustainable future for our business and for the communities in which we operate, part of what we call Creating Shared Value.
We know it’s our job to save water. Here’s ten ways we do it.
1. Recycling or reusing water in our operations.
Here in the Nestlé Trinidad and Tobago factory, we are aiming for a 35% reduction in our water consumption by 2020. Our Environmental sustainability roadmap will enable us to achieve this objective by setting key milestones for water reduction each year until 2020.
The primary avenues and measures employed to achieve this goal will involve recycling, reuse and optimization of our processes through both short term and long term investments and other projects. This approach will be reinforced with training and awareness of our employees in water use and conservations.
In 2016, a major project is underway to improve the water recovery efficiency of our reverse osmosis plant thereby reducing the quantity of water rejected from the process. Following this project, reject water will be captured in newly installed water tanks and reused in our waste processing operations. Our engineering team and other stakeholders are constantly reviewing and developing other process improvements to reduce and recycle water use.
Other short term projects will consist of water awareness and conservation communications, operational training to reduce errors in production, specific assessments to identify water leaks and regulating flow rates to our taps and showers to conserve water.
2. Reducing the water used by tonne of product.
Today the amount of water used to produce each tonne of product is 41% lower than it was ten years ago. 362 water-saving projects at our factories are projected to save a further 1.7 million cubic metres a year.
3. Piloting new methods and technologies.
In Vietnam we’ve trained coffee farmers to use low-tech irrigation methods to manage and record the water they’ve used to irrigate their crops. We’re also working with local scientists on a short-term weather prediction model which updates the weather forecast for the farmers every six hours.
4. Adopting new technology to cool our factories
A new dry cooling system at our dairy factory in the Azores means we no longer have to use large amounts of sea water to cool the equipment used to make milk powder. The annual saving last year was equivalent to the amount of water needed to fill more than 240 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
5. Working with partners to promote water stewardship.
Our factory in the Indian state of Karnataka is working with the local government and farmers on pilot projects for rice and sugar-cane growers, to help them adopt more efficient techniques for growing these water-intensive crops. Collective community action can help embed-long term sustainable water use.
6. Creating a ‘zero water’ factory in California.
We’re transforming our dairy factory in Modesto, California to use all of the water that is extracted from the milk we process, and then recycling it. By the end of 2016, we’ll save 98,000 cubic meters of water every year.
7. Helping farmers conserve water
In Panama we have help build spring water collection points in dairy farms. This means farmers can keep cows and calves in a better physical condition during the long dry season, and milk yields have risen by 10%.
8. Providing clean water and sanitation
Nearly 230,000 people in the cocoa-growing regions of Côte, d’Ivoire now have better access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene, thanks to our work with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. We’ve been working with the IFRC since 2002 and renewed our partnership for five more years in 2014.
9. Improving access to water and sanitation
Nestlé Pakistan has established seven drinking waters facilities near our factories. Globally, as a signatory of the WASH pledge we’ve ensured that every Nestlé employee has access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene of an appropriate standard in the workplace.
10.Educating the next generation
In Argentina our local bottled water brand Eco de los Andes raises awareness of water conservation in schools through the Green Ribbon programme. Throughout the year Nestlé Waters employee volunteers visit schools to help support teachers in lessons about environmental sustainability.
More information about each of these examples can be found in the Nestlé in society: Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments report 2015.
