Water

Stress on water resources is a serious issue for Diageo’s business globally. Water is an essential ingredient in our brands and a critical resource for our operations. However it is also vital to our markets, consumers and local communities. The issue is most acute in Africa where we have identified approximately 50% of our plants to be in water stressed areas. The UN predicts that 50% of the population of Africa will face water scarcity by 2025.

Diageo has set out to address its impact on water through a three pillar strategic ‘Blueprint’ designed to affect substantial, sustainable and measurable change through: (1) direct operations, (2) community involvement and (3) collective action. 

In this section we address our work to reduce water use and the polluting power of water in our direct operations. Please see the Water of Life section for information about our community investment and engagement initiatives.

We measure Diageo’s impact on water resources through the efficiency with which we use water, the amount of water that we waste, and the polluting impact of our wastewater, which can affect the supply of clean water to communities.

Since the production of our brands necessarily involves using water as an ingredient, we believe that measuring the efficiency of our water use is a more meaningful indicator than the total amount of water that we use. Therefore we have set a target to reduce the amount of water wasted at our operations in water stressed sites by 50% between 2007 and 2015, and improve water efficiency for Diageo as a whole by 30% over the same period. We have an additional target to reduce the polluting power of this wastewater (measured in biological oxygen demand (‘BOD’) per gram or litre of product) by 60% by 2015, as compared to our 2007 baseline.

For information on how we are working towards our water targets, please visit our Sustainability & Responsibility Report.