Water Stewardship

We seek to source all of our bottled waters responsibly. Our water sources are carefully selected and closely monitored to ensure consistent quality and sustainable yield, and we align our company with brands that do the same.

- - OUR GOAL
    
    Elevating our water stewardship practices through compliance by the end of 2025 with the Alliance for Water Stewardship’s international standards for all of our key owned spring water sources.
    
    In 2020, we made significant progress toward our water stewardship cornerstone initiative:
    - We received certifications from the Alliance for Water Stewardship (“AWS”) for our Diamond Spring site in Pennsylvania and our Wekiva Spring site in Florida; and
    - We remain on target to reach full AWS compliance of all key owned spring sources by 2025.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship is a multi-stakeholder international organization dedicated to enhancing water stewardship capacity and guiding, incentivizing and differentiating responsible water use. We joined the Alliance for Water Stewardship in 2019 as part of our commitment to ensuring our water usage and conservation efforts meet internationally recognized standards.

We are proud of the progress made in 2020 toward advancing our water usage and conservation efforts by becoming the first company in the world to have a spring water source certified under the AWS program (the AWS International Water Stewardship Standard is a comprehensive global benchmark for responsible water stewardship). SCS Global Services (SCS), a global leader in third-party certification of sustainability performance, confirmed on December 8, 2020 the certification of our Diamond Spring site in Pennsylvania and on December 30, 2020 confirmed the certification of our Wekiva Spring site in Florida based on independent, in-depth assessments.

AWS certification of the Diamond Spring and Wekiva Spring sites demonstrates that we have addressed five aspects of responsible water stewardship as follows:

good water governance
sustainable water balance
good water quality
important water-related areas
safe water, sanitation and hygiene

Our certification and water stewardship initiatives in North America are managed by a full-time hydrogeologist, responsible for effectively managing our spring water sources. As noted above, our Diamond Spring site in Pennsylvania and our Wekiva Spring site in Florida achieved certification under the AWS program in 2020, and we intend to begin the certification process for our Georgia and Arkansas spring water sources in 2021. Our goal is to have all of our key owned spring water sources certified by the AWS by 2025.

Our Membership: IBWA

We are members of the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA)

As a member of the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), our U.S.-based bottling plants meet IBWA’S strict Bottled Water Code of Practice and its standards of operation.

This includes:

adherence to the organization’s water reduction efficiency standards; and
careful selection of our water sources which are closely monitored to ensure consistent quality and sustainable yield.

Water Conservation

Our industry does its part to protect and preserve water resources.

Research shows that the bottled water industry is a minimal user of water, and bottled water production accounts for just 0.01% of all water used in the United States.* To put it in perspective, total U.S. bottled water consumption is about 19 billion gallons of water per year, which is the amount of tap water New York City uses in about 2.5 weeks.

In addition, the 2018’s IBWA’s Water and Energy Use Benchmarking Study – of which we were part of – showed that bottled water has the lowest water footprint of all packaged drinks. In North America, bottled water uses only 1.39 liters of water and 0.21 mega joules to produce a 1-liter of finished bottled water.

2020 Additional Highlights

In December 2020, our North American subsidiary installed a new reverse osmosis water capacity unit in our Euphrata, Pennsylvania bottling plant to reduce the amount of wastewater discharge and to improve the efficient use of our water resource.

*IBWA Water and Energy Use Benchmarking Study, 2018.

Local Distribution

Locally sourced, locally distributed, locally produced. This is our rallying cry when it comes to our spring sources and proximity to our bottling plants. Overall, when considering a spring source, we try to get as close as possible to a bottling plant to reduce the miles driven to and from the spring source.

Reports & Documents