Water Footprint: Why Bother and How to Reduce It

Credit: Water Footprint Network

First of all, environmental awareness and strategy is often part of what a business regards as its ‘corporate social responsibility’. Reducing the water footprint can be part of the environmental strategy of a business, just like reducing the carbon footprint. Second, many businesses actually face serious risks related to freshwater shortage in their operations or supply chain. What is a brewery without secure water supply or how can a company in jeans survive without continued supply of water to the cotton fields? A third reason to do water footprint accounting and formulate measures to reduce the corporate water footprint is to anticipate regulatory control by governments. In the current stage it is not so clear how governments will respond, but obviously regulations in some sectors of business may be expected. Finally, some businesses see a corporate water footprint strategy also as an instrument to reinforce the corporate image or to strengthen the brand name.

Businesses can reduce their operational water footprint by saving water in their own operations and bringing water pollution to zero. Keywords are: reduce, recycle and treat before disposal. For most businesses, however, the supply-chain water footprint is much larger than the operation footprint. It is therefore crucial that businesses address that as well. Achieving improvements in the supply chain may be more difficult – because not under direct control – but they may be more effective. Businesses can reduce their supply-chain water footprint by making supply agreements with certain standards with their suppliers or by simply changing to another supplier. In many cases it probably means quite something, because the whole business model may need to be transformed in order to incorporate or better control supply chains and to make supply chains fully transparent to consumers. Among the various alternative or supplementary tools that can help improving transparency are: setting quantitative water-footprint reduction targets, benchmarking, product labelling, certification and water footprint reporting.

For more information visit http://www.waterfootprint.org/