Water Management

Efforts to increase water efficiency and reuse contribute to protecting our rapidly depleting freshwater resources. In addition to new investments in R&D and innovative technologies, it is necessary to develop water policies and adopt a good and effective form of management.

The increase in human population and urbanization causes water usage to increase in all sectors, especially in agriculture and industry. As a result of the climate crisis, global rainfall is declining or changing patterns and water scarcity threatens a large part of the world’s population.

With the projects we carried out in 2019, we saved approximately 159,000 m³ of water in our operations in Turkey:

• The recycling and reuse of 107,636 m³ of wastewater from the function test system on the assembly line and the final rinse wastewater in the dyehouse of the Çayırova Washing Machine Plant, as well as the recycling and reuse of exit water and rainwater from the biological wastewater treatment plant,

• Saving 4,635 m³ at the Ankara Dishwasher Plant through our water efficiency projects,

• Recycling and reusing 38,000 m³ of water through water efficiency projects at the Eskişehir Refrigerator Plant,

• Saving 2,250 m³ of water through water saving efforts at the Eskişehir Compressor Plant,

• And saving 6,068 m³ of water through the recycling of wastewater at the Çerkezköy Dryer Plant.

In the last 10 years, we have saved 1.58 million m³ of water with our water efficiency projects. This amount is equivalent to the daily water consumption of approximately 2 million households.

Through water efficiency projects in our global operations, we have achieved a 6% reduction in water withdrawal in Romania, 7% in Russia, and 16% in China operations compared to the previous reporting period. With the efficiency projects we implemented in our Russia operations, we saved 5,971 m³ of water, and a total of 6,366 m³ of water in our South Africa operations thanks to the rainwater recycling and other water efficiency projects.

In addition to using wastewater, we treat discharged water according to its characteristics in chemical and biological treatment plants in all the regions where we operate, ensuring that discharged wastewater remains below legal discharge limits in order to protect water resources and biodiversity in the regions, and we periodically check compliance with these standards.

Water Efficiency Project with the International Finance Corporation (IFC)

Within the scope of our IFC Water Efficiency Project in 2019, our 18 production plants in Turkey, Romania, Russia, China, South Africa, Thailand and Pakistan were compared with the best practices of our sector in Europe as given in the IFC database. With IFC, we prepared the Water Efficiency Report for Arçelik production plants and identified areas for improvement in water efficiency. In line with the project’s output, we set our water target for 2030.

We use Internal Water Price (IWP) to determine the real price of water and encourage investments in water infrastructure. In the IWP calculation, we identified the water stress in the basins where we operate and completed three different scenario analyses and water stress projections for 2020-2030-2040.