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A water efficiency project in Narayanganj, Bangladesh, supported by Primark
Primark joined the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) as a founding member in 2021, supporting its approach to improve the use of water resources and its commitment to adopt and promote a universal water stewardship framework, the AWS Standard. The AWS sets out five key outcomes associated with good water stewardship: sustainable water balance, good water quality status, healthy status of freshwater ecosystems, improved water governance, and Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) for all.
To support these outcomes, Primark has developed a 2030 Water Impact and Stewardship Strategy. This strategy aims to enhance water management practices, reduce product water footprints, and mitigate adverse effects on hydrological systems, ecosystems and human health. The strategy includes mapping basin-level risks and evaluating operational water dependencies to identify suppliers and basins most vulnerable to water-related challenges. Primark recognises that climate change, increasing global demand for freshwater, and the rising levels of global pollution are putting additional pressure on already scarce water resources. Water quality and quantity risks are a key focus, and Primark aims to minimise these risks by prioritising basins with the greatest opportunities for impact.
The strategy includes three target areas for water management: product-based, site-based and catchment level.
For the product-based target area, which considers the entire value chain from cotton cultivation to consumer use, Primark aims to reduce the water footprint of products sold in the UK by 30% by 2030, in line with its commitment to WRAP’s Textiles 2030 initiative.
For the site-based target area, in 2024, Primark conducted a comprehensive water footprint assessment of its value chain, which will be updated annually. The assessment identified wet processing factories and cotton cultivation stages as the most dependent on freshwater. The assessment also uncovered the water footprint of the different materials which makes up its products. With this information, Primark aims to develop internal measures to further drive the adoption of more sustainable materials.
Along with suppliers in stressed sourcing basins, Primark is collaborating with other water users, including brands and governing bodies, to address shared water challenges. Primark identifies stressed basins using tools such as WWF’s Water Risk Filter and WRI Aqueduct’s screening tool, which aggregate water availability, quality and access risks.
Primark has expanded resource efficiency programmes across China, India and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, 29 factories have identified more than 2 million m³ of water per year of potential savings, resulting in an average 17% reduction in water use across those factories. The insights gained will guide a broader rollout.
Primark also launched a water recycling project this year through the Sustainable Manufacturing and Environmental Pollution (SMEP) programme in Bangladesh, which will introduce innovative technologies to reduce micropollutants and enable wastewater recycling. This project takes a holistic approach to the supply chain, examining how wastewater recycling can be integrated within a factory’s broader resource management (energy, water and chemicals). Primark will work with local stakeholders in both the public and private sectors to share project outcomes and promote improvements in local water governance.
On the catchment level target area, Primark is committed to support catchment-scale projects in priority basins where water challenges pose the greatest risk to people and nature. Beyond reducing its own water footprint, Primark is involved in broader water stewardship initiatives to address shared challenges. The membership of AWS is a key part of this approach, incorporating community engagement, biodiversity and governance considerations, to address water challenges holistically.
To ensure the business is contributing towards basin level resilience, Primark has aligned its priority basins within its supply chains with those identified by the UN’s Water Resilience Coalition (WRC), which has identified the world’s 100 priority basins for collective action, enabling the business to collaborate and scale impact with other water dependent stakeholders.
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OMB scientist testing wastewater samples, sent from Primark supply chain factories in Dhaka, to investigate linkages between water quality and ecotoxicity through OMB’s unique biosensor technology
Identifying the influence of various water users on water quality issues within the environment is complex. Interaction between industrial and domestic water users with the local hydrology, in addition to the existence of numerous water quality indicators, makes it difficult to link site level action with outcomes and impacts within a catchment.
To better understand this link, Primark supports a project with Oxford Molecular Biosensors (OMB) which is part of Oxford University. They have developed a biosensor to measure water quality using one aggregate indicator, ecotoxicity. Ecotoxicity is a measurement of the toxicity of aggregate constituents within water and their impact on freshwater species.
OMB is also the developer of a unique catchment water quality monitoring tool, Integrated Catchment model (INCA). This unique model allows for the quantification of the impact of various sources of pollution within the wider environment. The aim, through collaboration with Primark and eventually other stakeholders, is to combine the biosensor and INCA tools to begin to quantify the impact of site-level interventions on the wider environment, better linking water quality with outcomes to nature and to people.
Water filtration equipment ready to ship to Bangladesh for Primark’s innovative wastewater recycling and micro pollution removal project
In 2023/24, Primark supported a collaboration between The Microfibre Consortium and the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) Foundation, as part of a wider task force to link suspended solids in wastewater with the concentration of microfibres. Importantly, this link enables Primark to better recommend effluent treatment plant processes to our suppliers to help with the removal of microfibres.
Primark is conducting research on how interventions and membrane technologies, such as those used in the Sustainable Manufacturing and Environmental Pollution project to recycle water, can contribute towards microfibre removal. It is working to understand the most appropriate pore size for membranes when considering the increased energy required as pore sizes decrease, and removal rates increase. Next year, it will incorporate these learnings as part of a broader water quality and wastewater recovery strategy.
