Reducing water use

Our global commitment is to safely return to nature the same amount of water used in making our drinks by 2020, to set the standard for water efficiency, establish a water sustainable operation and minimise water impacts throughout our entire value chain. With these commitments in mind, we have undertaken a variety of initiatives across our GB operations.

Monitoring and targeting

One of the main ways we reduce water use is by closely monitoring exactly what we use, so we've installed additional water meters at all of our manufacturing sites. Along with a range of best practice initiatives we've reduced our water usage ratio, since 2007, by 29% at Sidcup; 14% at Edmonton; 11% at East Kilbride and 10% at Wakefield.

Schweppes Abbey Well water usage

Schweppes Abbey Well is the official bottled water of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is bottled at our manufacturing site at Morpeth, which we acquired in 2008. In 2010, its water use ratio was 1.74 litres per litre of product produced, which was some way off our overall GB ratio of 1.36 litres per litre of product.

As a result, we set ourselves a challenge to reduce water use to 1.2 litres per litre produced by the start of London 2012. We have analysed the usage of water across the whole site, and introduced additional metering to help monitor that usage.

By identifying the main water users we were able to focus our efforts in areas that could deliver the biggest savings. As a result, in 2011 we achieved a water use ratio of 1.24 litres per litre, a reduction of 29%. Current performance is in line with the Olympic challenge of achieving 1.2 litres per litre of product.