(Photo Credit: Mike Mozart, Flickr Creative Commons)Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, says its restaurants saved an estimated 1.3 billion gallons of water last year. According to the company’s 2017 Global Citizenship & Sustainability Report published today, this water efficiency was achieved through smart building practices.
The report says that the company implemented 40,000 energy and water-savings technologies in 2017. More than a third of their new restaurants currently meet Yum! Brands’ green building guidelines for water consumption.
“Good water stewardship matters to employees, customers, and shareholders, as underscored by the results of our materiality assessment,” the report says. “We have been addressing water use in our restaurants since 2005, when we set a goal to reduce water consumption in company-owned restaurants by 10% by 2015. Yum reached our goal in 2017 and avoided using roughly 2.2 billion gallons of water during that time period.”
Those savings come from these water conservation measures:
In a mini case study, the company says that irrigation can account for up to 45% of a Taco Bell restaurant’s water use. “After a conservation pilot program in 2012 successfully demonstrated a 40% reduction in irrigation water, Taco Bell overhauled the irrigation systems in over 900 of its company-owned restaurants and updated its specification for new construction to a new, less water-intensive standard,” the report noted.
Yum Brands’ current goal is to reduce average restaurant water consumption by an additional 10% by the end of 2025, with a focus on high water-stress areas.
In addition to water savings, Yum Brands reported keeping more than 750,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in 2017 through energy conservation, food waste donation, and recycling efforts.
The full report is available here.
