We recognise the importance of sustainable water use. It is essential to our production processes and used widely throughout our value chain, from the growing of the fruit that goes into our drinks to the cleaning of our bottling lines. Managing our impact on water, and protecting this precious resource, is a top priority for us.
Our approach to managing our water focuses on three key areas:
- Water withdrawal - Reducing the amount of water we withdraw from water sources, including boreholes and municipal supplies, and improving water efficiency to make the water we use go further.
- Water effluent - We release water back to the environment and take careful measures to ensure it meets stringent quality standards, protecting our natural water courses.
- Water in our supply chain - Water scarcity is a threat we take seriously and have been working to understand which of our sourcing regions are at greatest risk and increasing our dialogue with suppliers accordingly.
In 2021, we launched our partnership with The Rivers Trust to protect Britain’s waterways.
We’ll be working with our local rivers trusts to take practical action and improve the quality of waterways near our production sites. This activity will include:
- Britvic’s Leeds factory and The Aire Rivers Trust working together to improve biodiversity near the site.
- Britvic’s Rugby factory and Severn Rivers Trust working together on a range of conservation projects including tree planting and wetland and meadow creation.
- Britvic’s Beckton factory in London working with rivers trust Thames 21 to help restore 1.2km of the River Roding near Wanstead Park.
Water efficiency
We take our responsibility for water management seriously and we are always looking to improve our water stewardship.
In 2020, our Engineering team took steps to improve our water efficiency across our manufacturing sites. This led to optimising the running time when cleaning our lines between products. The outcome of this project at our largest factory in Rugby resulted in cutting on average 30,000 litres of water per day.