Conserving water

Water is a basic existential substance for people, animals and plants. Only just under three percent of global water reserves are fresh water, salt water makes up the rest. Water is used by the world's populations, the industry and businesses as drinking and service water. Industrial companies and the manufacturing sector take about 75 percent of the water they need from rivers, lakes and reservoirs. By contrast, almost 70 percent of water used by drinking water suppliers comes from groundwater and spring water. Farmers take 76 percent of the water they need to irrigate arable crops, fruits and vegetables from groundwater and spring water.

While our production processes are very energy-intensive, they use little to no water in comparison to other production industries. To maintain our operations, water is required primarily for cooling in our production processes. Water is, of course, also used to operate sanitary facilities. We source over 80 percent of our total water usage from groundwater, with the rest coming from the municipal water supply. Thanks to closed cooling circuits that we operate using plate heat exchangers, free cooler systems and cold pumps, we are able to use water as efficiently as possible.

In terms of water withdrawal, the strong increase in surface water in 2020 is particularly striking. This is due to the ongoing improvement in data quality. Our total water consumption, the difference between water withdrawal and return, has reduced by around 20 percent since 2018 and was in total 46,024m³ in 2020.

Total water consumption (m³)

Using water even more efficiently requires looking more specifically at the regions in which our sites are located. In 2020, a total of nine sites carried out a local water risk assessment.

We also want to evaluate the effects of water in our value chain by specifically assessing the supplier evaluations. As water does not play a major role in comparison to the other resources we use, we would like to focus primarily on regions that are considered “water stressed areas” according to the classification in the WWF Water Risk Filter¹. In line with the principle “think globally, act locally”, we will put the emphasis on water savings potential at our sites in these regions. 20 Greiner production sites are currently located in water stressed areas. In the 2020 reporting year, only two water efficiency measures were implemented in these regions. To better promote more efficient and sustainable water usage, in the next reporting period we will review the water savings potential at all sites in water risk areas and develop a water policy for all Greiner sites. Currently, only six Greiner sites have a water policy. We intend to change this.

As we expanded data collection again in the reporting period, we also increased our CDP water score from C- to B-. Moving forwards, we will continue to work on further improving our CDP ranking.

Our CDP water score

¹ Sites which, according to the WWF Water Risk Filter 2020, are in areas with a general operational risk/drainage area risk above factor 3.