We at Anheuser-Busch have a responsibility to be stewards of the water that sustains our communities, gives life to our earth, and goes into the beers we proudly brew.
Anheuser-Busch partners with environmental groups who share our purpose to protect our environment, such as Keep America Beautiful and River Network. As a result, we’ve organized more than 13,000 Anheuser-Busch employees, family members, and friends to volunteer for more than 150 river and watershed protection cleanups across the country, with 20 additional cleanups planned for this year to improve local water quality and availability. We’ve also mobilized more than 43,000 volunteers to plant over 63,000 trees and remove over 840,000 pounds of trash for World Environment Day since 2010.
At Anheuser-Busch, we’re proud to commit to the future of our planet with programs that support water stewardship throughout our supply chain. These programs include Smart Agriculture, where we work with our growers to reduce water usage in farming, and partnerships with groups such as Water.Org through Stella Artois, a program where purchasing a special edition chalice will provide five years of clean drinking water for one person in the developing world. Since 2015, Stella’s “Buy a Lady a Drink” campaign has changed the lives of more than 1.5 million people, with the goal of providing access to clean water for over 3.5 million people in the developing world by 2020.
Anheuser-Busch’s water conservancy goals also continue to flourish at home, in our breweries and facilities, where we’ve already reduced our water usage across our 12 major breweries by nearly 50 percent in the past ten years – the equivalent of 73 billion cans of beer!
Finding the right solutions is all about teamwork, and programs such as our annual “How Much Water Can You Save” competition challenges employees from our 45 facilities across the country to develop new ways to save water at their facilities. We also participate in a global “Shark Tank”-style competition to design new sustainability initiatives.
By 2025, our goals include ensuring 100 percent of our 100+ facilities and breweries are engaged in water efficiency efforts and reducing our water usage by an additional 9 percent, saving more than 740 million gallons of water. These goals also include new targets around ensuring water access and quality in high-stress communities.
To learn more about our water stewardship programs, click here, and to read how our employees make them possible, click here.
Building on our history of innovation in water conservation efforts and achieving our Sustainability Goals give us purpose beyond brewing.
