We Break Ice With Bacardi And Discover Their Water Secrets

We spent some time with Bacardi’s Global Sustainability Director Dave Howson to understand how the company has cut water use by 54% in seven years and also to get an insight into what he’ll be sharing with us at our Resource Efficiency summit.

You’re now Global Sustainability Director, how did you get into the industry?

I’ve been with Bacardi for more than 16 years in various operational roles. Following my move from the Bacardi UK business to the Global Procurement function in our Geneva office back in 2007, I was tasked with implementing and leading our Responsible Sourcing program as part of the Bacardi Corporate Responsibility platform.

I joined the Corporate Responsibility Leadership team and we began to discuss how we could work up a sustainability program focused on three of our key areas; sourcing, operations and packaging. It grew from there and when we’d built the business case I was the appointed to lead our Good Spirited initiative, which we launched in February 2014.

Bacardi have managed to cut water use by 54% in seven years, what approach did the company take to achieving that?

Once we’d undertaken an analysis of our sites’ water use, we focused on Mexico, India and Puerto Rico as the sites with some water scarcity issues, and then followed this with the sites which use a lot of water in absolute terms – ie the Scotch whisky distilleries.

At each site we implemented a number of programs, including:

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