Water harvesting sytems for underserved communities

Many communities in Mexico lack access to clean water, which negatively impacts their health. Additionally, water scarcity affects our business operations. Since 2022, we have partnered with an NGO to build water harvesting systems in underserved communities. This is one of many projects we implement to better manage water resources, a scarce but essential resource for both our production facilities and local communities.

Concrete actions for water stewardship

At Boehringer Ingelheim, we proactively act to protect clean water and continuously reduce our water footprint in all communities where we operate. We have committed to 100% protection of clean water, by mitigating pharmaceuticals in wastewater from production and act responsibly across the entire water use cycle from source to end – an approach which is called water stewardship.
We implement a holistic water management strategy and are a member of the reputable Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS). AWS is currently the leading industry water stewardship standard that offers the only certification available which considers the water usage on site as well as in the entire catchment. Its implementation is essential especially in production sites located in high water-stressed catchments.
Our site in Xochimilco, Mexico, received AWS certification in 2019: the first pharmaceutical site in the world. We were re-certified in 2023.
To date, six of our production sites are located in high water stress areas: Xochimilco (Mexico) and Fremont (USA) are already AWS certified. Sant Cugat (Spain), our two sites in Shanghai (China) and Koropi (Greece) are in the process of getting certified. We aim to have them all AWS certified by 2030.