Water

Performance

pRotect

Our Water Futures partnership with WWF and GIZ (a German international development agency) aims to tackle water scarcity by developing new approaches to water management. In August we published our second Water Futures PDF (1.94Mb) report which explained the actions already taken to address water risk in the initial four partner countries (Peru, South Africa, Ukraine and Tanzania).

During the year, we also expanded the partnership to include our businesses in four new markets: the USA, Colombia, India and Honduras.

In the USA, MillerCoors is working with The Nature Conservancy to improve habitats and safeguard the watershed in the barley-growing Silver Creek Valley in Idaho.  Improvements made on a model barley farm, designed to showcase best conservation practices, have increased yields and saved almost 125 million gallons (4.7 million hectolitres) of water, about 9% of the farm's annual water use. They're also expected to reduce energy use by an estimated 10-20%.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

At SABMiller, we are committed to making more beer using less water. Between 2008 and 2015, we've set ourselves the challenging target of reducing our water use by 25% per hectolitre of lager. This reduction will save around 20 billion litres of water every year, which is enough to fill 8,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Water to lager ratio down 5% to 4.0hl/hl

The equivalent water consumption figure for soft drinks is 2.2 hectolitres of water per hectolitre of soft drink, a decrease from 2.4 last year. While this is significantly lower than the figure for beer consumption, they are difficult to compare directly owing to the different processes that are employed to produce each product.

Our breweries are seeking ways to save water through reducing, reusing and recycling. In Uganda, for example, Nile Breweries has reduced its water consumption from eight hectolitres of water per hectolitre of beer produced in 2006 to 4.7 hectolitres today. This year Nile Breweries also commissioned its newly-built waste water effluent plant. The plant has the capacity to treat 3,000 cubic meters of effluent per day and will provide biogas to be used as fuel for the brewery's boilers.   

Watch the animation below to see how water is being managed in our breweries using the 5R water model.

 

Redistribute

Through our Corporate Social Investment (CSI) activities we seek to provide local communities with clean water or to treat waste water so it can be used for irrigation or other purposes. We currently have active programmes in India, Tanzania, Mozambique, Lesotho, Uganda and Swaziland providing access to water and supporting local farmers and crop irrigation. This year, Nile Breweries built three more boreholes for farming communities that grow sorghum and barley for brewing. Nile Breweries have now built 11 boreholes which provide safe, clean water to over 8,500 people.