wet feet

a water footprint?

In 2009 we worked with the Water Footprint Network (WFN) and Kingston University to develop a water footprint of the innocent business. It's a similar concept to a carbon footprint, calculating the total amount of freshwater used during the making of one of our drinks. The key was breaking it down to understand the water use at every step of the chain, growing the fruit, transporting, crushing and blending, manufacturing the packaging, bottling the drinks and distributing them to a chiller near you. This segmented approach allows us to calculate a more accurate number and to highlight the hotspots for action.

how's it done?

Whilst there is now an accepted technique for calculating a carbon footprint, water footprinting is quite a new discipline and it is still evolving. Back in 2009 there wasn't one completely consistent approach to follow which made our task both challenging and interesting at the same time (lots of spreadsheet fun). The nice folk at the WFN came up with the concept in the first place however, so we followed their guidance. As it's such a big job, we focused on just one recipe: our strawberries and bananas smoothie. We chose that recipe for a number of reasons and mapping it has taught us about several of our other products.

Meet Dr S.

Please say hello to Dr. Stuart Downward. He's a Principal Lecturer in Hydrology at Kingston University and he gave us a hand with our water action plan. He knows just about everything there is to know about water (including Oxbow lakes) and has been studying and teaching about the wet stuff for almost 15 years now. He has great knowledge of sustainable water management practices so we're really lucky to have benefited from his help.

our water footprint

One of the key things we discovered was that over 99% of our water footprint is in the growing of our fruit. Not too surprising I suppose for a product that's 100% whole crushed fruit and juices and nothing else. Some of the fruits were thirstier than others, as you can see below.

The really interesting part though comes when you start to map where those fruits are all grown. The majority of our fruit comes from places with plenty of water, however a few grow in regions with some degree of water stress (the inability of freshwater supplies within a region to satisfy water demands). These latter regions are where we are turning our attention.

As if this wasn't complicated enough... the other thing that's important to consider in a footprint is how much of the water taken to grow those fruits comes from rainwater (aka green water) and how much is irrigated (aka blue water). This pie chart represents the ratio of these two different 'types' of water used to grow all the fruits in our strawberries and bananas recipe. We were pleased that less than 25% of the fruit being irrigated is fairly low, and allows us to focus our water efficiency work. Irrigation isn't necessarily a problem, but it can be a sign of water availability risk.