Tech behemoths Facebook and Google and the food and beverage giant PepsiCo recently announced plans to become “water positive” by 2030, with the goal of offsetting the large volumes of water used in their operations. Part of a growing trend of large, water-intensive corporations focusing on water replenishment as a key indicator of their sustainability efforts, the moves by the companies raise the profile of water stewardship as a means of establishing corporate environmental responsibility. The actions also offer potential opportunities for utilities and nonprofit organizations to partner with large corporations on efforts related to water conservation and watershed restoration, particularly in water-stressed regions.

‘Ambitious goal’

On August 19, Facebook announced a “new goal to be water positive by 2030,” according to a same-day news release from the company. “This means Facebook will return more water to the environment than we consumed for our global operations,” the company said. “Reaching this ambitious goal will require a combination of water restoration efforts starting in regions that are highly water stressed, as well as technologies to increase water efficiency at our facilities.”

Although its goal to become water positive by the end of the decade is new, Facebook’s water restoration efforts are not. “As of today, we have invested in water restoration projects that will replenish more than 850 million gallons (3.2 million cubic meters) of water per year, and we are not done yet,” says Melanie Roe, a spokesperson for Facebook. “In 2020, we restored around 595 million gallons (2.25 million cubic meters) of water in high water stress regions,” Roe says. She declined to say how much Facebook plans to spend on its future water replenishment efforts.

These water replenishment totals are the result of six projects completed by Facebook between 2018 and 2020, according to an August 2021 report describing the volumetric water benefits of the company’s water stewardship program. The report was prepared by LimnoTech, which has been verifying Facebook’s water restoration projects since 2018. Two other projects were completed in 2020 and are expected to begin providing benefits in 2021, according to the report. The eight projects are located in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah.

Water restoration projects are located in watersheds in which Facebook operates a data center. More specifically, the projects are “located in areas degraded by past activities that have altered the hydrology and ecosystems,” according to the report. “The completed projects restore water-related ecosystems...including floodplains, riparian areas, wetlands, and waterways by implementing activities that help restore the hydrology,” the report notes. “In addition to volumetric water benefits, these projects contribute to improvements in water quality, summer baseflows, and aquatic habitat.” 

Facebook and watershed restoration

The largest of these efforts, from a volumetric perspective, is a project to restore flows on the Provo River in Utah. Implemented in 2020, the 10-year project involves Facebook paying the Central Utah Water Conservancy District for lost revenues associated with maintaining a certain minimum flow volume in the lower Provo River between April 15 and October 15. All told, the project had an estimated volumetric water benefit of 1,574,000 m3 in 2020, or roughly 70 percent of Facebook’s overall water savings for that year, according to the report.

For its watershed restoration projects, “we partnered with trusted, local environmental non-profits and utility providers to identify projects that would have the greatest impact,” Facebook said in its release. “In the coming years we plan to expand this work internationally, including in Ireland, Singapore, India, [the United Kingdom], and Mexico.”

Facebook also will continue its efforts to reduce the amount of water it uses as part of its operations. “Our data centers are designed to be 80 percent more efficient than the industry standard,” Roe says. “At Facebook’s data center in Eagle Mountain, Utah, we partner with the city so that our recycled water from our data center is used to irrigate public parks,” she notes. “At our headquarters in Menlo Park, California, we have a blackwater treatment system that allows us to recycle 16 million gallons of water per year,” Roe says.

Replenishing 120 percent

Google made a similar commitment regarding water stewardship in September. The company is “pledging to a water stewardship target to replenish more water than we consume by 2030 and support water security in communities where we operate,” said Kate Brandt, Google’s chief sustainability officer, in a September 9 blog post on the company’s website. 

“This means Google will replenish 120 [percent] of the water we consume, on average, across our offices and data centers,” Brandt said. “We’re focusing on three areas: enhancing our stewardship of water resources across Google office campuses and data centers; replenishing our water use and improving watershed health and ecosystems in water-stressed communities; [and] sharing technology and tools that help everyone predict, prevent and recover from water stress.”

Google did not respond to an inquiry from OWN regarding the company’s current performance in terms of water replenishment, how far it must go to reach its goal of 120-percent replenishment by 2030, and how much it intends to spend on these efforts. That said, in fiscal year 2019, the company’s worldwide operations entailed water withdrawals of approximately 5.2 billion gallons, according to the Google Environmental Report 2020 released by the company in March 2021. 

In 2020, Google began implementing its first water replenishment projects, according to the document Google Water Stewardship: Accelerating positive change at Google, and beyond, which was released by the company in September 2021. “Google will make significant investments in both watershed replenishment and watershed health projects to improve water security and access for communities where we operate around the world,” the document states.

For its watershed replenishment projects, Google will fund projects offsite from its properties. 

“Many replenishment projects are nature-based solutions and others involve infrastructure improvements,” the document states. “Examples of these projects include wetland restoration,  reforestation, rainwater harvesting, and stormwater management.”

At the same time, Google also will pursue watershed health projects to address local water challenges. Such projects are intended to help “support good water quality, access to clean drinking water, sanitation, and protection of ecosystems,” the document states. “Examples of watershed health projects include improving fish passage through barrier removal, riparian river  restoration, providing potable water to meet community needs, and agricultural best  management practices.” 

Other pledges

The pledges by Facebook and Google to become water positive by 2030 come about a year after a similar declaration by Microsoft. In September 2020, the company promised to replenish more water than it consumes by the end of the decade.

“Our replenishment strategy will include investments in projects such as wetland restoration and the removal of impervious surfaces like asphalt, which will help replenish water back into the basins that need it most,” said Brad Smith, the president and vice chair of Microsoft, in a September 21, 2020, blog post on the company’s website.

Tech companies are not the only ones looking to reduce their water footprint. In August, PepsiCo stated its commitment to become “net water positive” by 2030, according to an August 17 news release from the company. PepsiCo will achieve its goal by reducing its absolute water use and replenishing “back into the local watershed more than 100 [percent] of the water used at company-owned and third-party sites in high-water-risk areas,” the statement notes.

PepsiCo will reduce its water use by adopting strict water-use-efficiency standards at more than 1,000 sites, nearly half of which are located in high-risk watersheds, the company said. “Raising the efficiency standard at company-owned sites in high-risk watersheds alone will allow PepsiCo to avoid using more than 11 billion liters of water a year, a 50 [percent] reduction in the amount of water the company uses at these sites,” according to the release.

Along with seeking to improve its water efficiency efforts, PepsiCo is pursuing water replenishment. “To do that, we’re working with partners to deploy a range of initiatives that restore the health of high-risk watersheds and increase their ability to absorb rainfall into their aquifers, rivers and reservoirs,” the company says on its website.

“Water scarcity is directly linked to the climate crisis, and at PepsiCo we believe a global effort to be ‘net water positive’ is essential,” said Jim Andrew, the company’s chief sustainability officer, in the release. “We’re focused not only on making sure people around the world have access to this vital resource, but ensuring that we are also prioritizing water stewardship in our operations everywhere,” Andrew said.

Assessing results

With more companies pledging to become water positive, how readily and accurately can they gauge the extent to which they are achieving their aim of returning water to the environment? The answer to this question depends on various factors, says David Sedlak, the Plato Malozernoff Professor and director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Water conservation “can be tracked readily,” Sedlak notes. “The other aspects of their approaches—using unconventional water sources or restoring watersheds—may be harder to assess,” he says. “However, with enough transparency it would be possible to figure out if the impacts were real.”

It remains to be seen whether companies such as Facebook and Google ultimately succeed in becoming water positive. “Time will tell whether or not these actions will accomplish the stated goals,” Sedlak says. 

Meanwhile, can such efforts be expected to reap significant environmental benefits? It is possible, Sedlak says. “We should not discount the impacts of actions by single companies or industries,” Sedlak says.

“Server farms, office parks, and manufacturing plants might only consume a few percent of the total water use of a metropolitan area, but if multiple industries were to achieve these aspirational goals, it might start making a difference, possibly dropping water demand ten or twenty percent across a region,” Sedlak says. “That won’t necessarily save us from long-term droughts or the impacts of climate change, but it could help.”

Businesses that make an effort to reduce their water demands deserve kudos, Sedlak says. “In my opinion, it is important that companies are starting to recognize the impact of their actions on water security and are not simply passing off the responsibility for water provision to the government or the cities that host their facilities,” he says. “The best outcome would be for companies to identify ways to reduce water use without increasing energy use or increasing pollution.”