innocent drinks : all about us

water work

We've got a clear strategy for water management within our extended supply chain now. The key elements are:

Measureour current usage â€“ the first step was our water footprint study.
Reducewater use within our UK manufacturing operations. Even though this area of our supply chain represents less than 1% of our footprint, in absolute terms it's still a sizeable amount so we believe we have a responsibility to improve water efficiencies as much as possible.
Protect areas of water stress in countries where we source our fruit - having identified the high risk fruit growing regions we're starting to work on plans to try and improve matters on the ground.
Sharethe knowledge - with our business partners and consumers alike. We're committed to staying up to date on the debate around water resources management. If you want to know any more just drop us a line at the usual address - hello@innocentdrinks.co.uk.

We buy some of our strawberries from the south of Spain. Unfortunately the rain in Spain falls mostly where our strawberries aren't. For this reason the farmers rely quite heavily on irrigation to grow all these lovely, juicy berries, and the available water supply is being put under considerable stress from the combination of increased agricultural production and housing developments. Water supply in this area is also particularly important given it's proximity to the Donana National Park - a key stopover wetland for 6 million migratory birds each year from Northern Europe to Southern Africa.

In 2010 we commenced a project in partnership with our supplier and Unilever to map the water footprint of a number of our strawberry farms. The footprint will show exactly how much water each farm has used across the entire season (from planting through to end of harvest). The season finished at the end of June 2011, and we are now in the process of analysing the water data to identify opportunities to improve the water efficiency of the farms. After the summer we will be holding a workshop with our farmers on how to implement these methods. We will also be sharing the data with the WWF to input into current water management planning for the entire region. We hope that our work will form a valuable contribution to establishing how agriculture, housing and the wetland can happily co-exist in this region.

...if you put your mind to it. We set one of our packing sites the challenge of reducing their water usage and they totally went for it. We kicked off with a water footprint exercise during spring 2009 and lo and behold they reduced total water usage on site by a corking 10% in just 4 months. They achieved this through a manner of means, including the simple (and free) stuff like reducing flow rates here and there and checking all hoses had triggers on the end. They also formed a crack team of water saving champions who stealthily worked their way around every last pipe, drain and spout allowing them to cut another 10% by the end of 2010. Good work lads and lasses. Some of our other sites have started to really focus on water now too. One of them introduced a clever system last year which captures all the condensation from the bottling process and returns it to the system so it can clean more pipes rather than go down the drain.

If reading all that has made you feel motivated to understand the size of your own personal water footprint, then you can take a look here. And if you want a few practical tips on how to go about reducing your water footprint or that of your workplace, then there's some great ideas on how to do just that right here.