What it Means
Water is a critical resource for all our ingredients and we understand how essential the availability of clean water is to food production. We are committed to driving water stewardship and this means much more than just reducing our consumption of water. We aim to build our understanding of the water related social, environmental and economic risks and opportunities in our business and supply chain and to work responsibly with other stakeholders to drive positive outcomes at a catchment level.
We recognise the importance of identifying water stressed environments and that our approach to water needs to address operations in these locations. This means ensuring water management programs for our operations and the production of our ingredients aim to optimise water efficiency, address depleting water reserves, as well as safely returning water outputs back to ecosystems.
What We’ve Achieved
As part of our environmental management system we have water efficiency targets and track water use across our manufacturing sites. We invested $5 million in a wastewater treatment plant upgrade in Fiji to improve water quality for downstream users and reduced water use at our Christchurch dairy site by over 2 million litres per year through the efforts of a site based “green team”.
What’s Next
We will continue to optimise the efficiency of our water use, and continue to invest in improving the quality of water leaving our sites. We are working to better understand water stress in regions where we operate or from which key ingredients are sourced to better inform our water stewardship strategies. We will also consider the overall water footprint of our ingredients, and work with supply chain partners and other stakeholders to drive improvements.
