We’re marking World Water Day with an update on our progress on water conservation. Guided by our materiality assessments on what to prioritise, Glanbia has a robust and ambitious approach to environmental sustainability. We are dedicated to water conservation across all our facilities, aiming to reduce freshwater use by 10% by 2025 versus 2021 baseline.
Glanbia has a long heritage of water efficiency. Water is material to Glanbia as a precious natural resource and we recognise it is increasingly pressurised by a growing world population and the impacts of climate change. All our manufacturing sites continuously focus on water quality and sustainable wastewater discharge. Overall Glanbia is a water positive business as we actively recover and return more treated water to the environment than is drawn as freshwater.
We are making good progress against our ambitious targets. From 2015 to 2020 we reduced water use intensity by 17% in our manufacturing sites, with Southwest Cheese in Clovis, New Mexico being a key contributor to this achievement. This is due to its water return to the environment being significantly greater than its freshwater withdrawal.
Our relentless focus on water use efficiency in 2023 resulted in us realising a 3.4% decrease in absolute freshwater withdrawal and a reduction in freshwater use intensity by 6% compared to a 2021 base year. Our sites at Richfield and Twin Falls in Idaho and our MWC plant in St John's Michigan all made great progress in 2023.
Our plant in Richfield delivered the biggest absolute decrease in freshwater consumption, reducing by 9.2% and 64 million litres versus 2022. This is due to improved water recovery in their steam condensate system and upgraded automation systems throughout the plant.
Our award-winning MWC cheese and whey plant reduced consumption by 5.5% from a 2022 baseline. The reductions were informed by water metering improvements that deliver actionable insights to our operations’ leadership teams. Since 2022 the site has invested in projects that will deliver an estimated saving of nearly 530,000 litres of water per day focusing on water silo modifications, wastewater treatment plant routing improvements and improved polished water utilisation for cleaning.
We are proud of the progress we are making and will continue to challenge ourselves to deliver our ambition. In 2024 we’ll continue to seek enhancements, driven by data and leveraging learnings across our operations as we close in on our 2025 target of a 10% reduction in freshwater use.