ABSTRACT
Consumers associate drinks with water, so it is logical that if one sector must be interested in the water footprint, it must be companies that produce and sell bottled water, soft drinks, juices, beer, wine or other beverages. And indeed, the beverage sector shows a lot of interest in the water footprint (BIER, 2011). The first company to show interest in the water footprint was The Coca-Cola Company. I remember well my first meeting with Greg Koch, Managing Director Global Water Stewardship at Coca-Cola, in a café-restaurant along one of the canals in Amsterdam, on the first day of summer in 2007. Greg explained to me that the company had focused on reducing water use within their bottling plants worldwide already for a couple of years and that they had become interested in the water use in their supply chain as well. Coca-Cola is one of the biggest buyers of sugar in the world and Greg had noticed that producing sugar can take a lot of water. He realized that the water footprint concept offered the possibility to better understand the complete water footprint of a beverage, because the concept refers to water consumption and pollution over the whole supply chain. This first meeting with Greg was the start of a consequent number of efforts by The Coca-Cola Company to better understand the water footprint of their company. Initially they focused on their most famous product, Coca-Cola, but soon they started to look at other beverages within their product portfolio as well (TCCC and TNC, 2010). PepsiCo soon followed the example of Coca-Cola and other companies also started to explore the water footprint of some of their products. Unilever already had some history in looking at the sustainability of their supply chain but had hardly looked at water use. At the occasion of the launch of the Global Water Footprint Standard in February 2011, Donna Jeffries, Sustainability Manager at Unilever, said that Unilever aims ‘to halve the environmental footprint of its product portfolio across the life cycle’. She continued saying that ‘water is one of our key metrics and we support efforts to standardize methodology and improve access
to scientifically robust and standardized data’. As one of the first efforts, Unilever started to explore the water footprint of tea, which made sense given the fact that Unilever is the largest buyer of tea in the world, purchasing approximately 12 per cent of the world’s supply of black tea. Among the beer companies, the first company to explore the water footprint of their product was SABMiller. They started in 2009 by comparing the water footprints of beer bottled in South Africa and beer from the Czech Republic (SABMiller and WWF-UK, 2009). Differences could be explained mostly from differences in the water consumed for producing the barley and hops in the two countries. A year later SABMiller published a second report on the water footprint of their beer, with case studies from Tanzania, Peru, the Ukraine and again South Africa (SABMiller et al., 2010). Other beer companies also started to carry out water footprint studies, including Heineken, for example. In Chile, a couple of wine companies started to look into the water footprint of their products. The major lesson for all those companies that recently started to explore the water footprint of their beverages was that the largest part of the total water footprint of a beverage is in the process of producing the ingredients, not in bottling. As a result, if companies want to make their beverages more sustainable, they will have to actively consider their supply chain. Most beverage companies know how many litres of water they use in their own operations and have often set targets in time to reduce this operational water use. Reduction of the water footprint in the bottling plants, however, will have only a minor effect on the total water footprint of the beverage. There have been no companies yet ready to adopt water footprint reduction targets for their supply chain, but this will inevitably happen. Consumers are increasingly aware of environmental issues in the supply chain of products; it is unlikely that future consumers will accept beverages that are labelled ‘sustainable’ based on efforts done in the bottling stage alone.
