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Water use

GSK’s water standard requires sites to minimise water use and to reuse water whenever feasible.

In 2005, we used 22 million cubic metres of water. This is about average for the industry, based on benchmarking with other major pharmaceutical companies. We source water mainly from municipal water supplies (59%), wells or boreholes (40%), with a small amount from other sources.

Total water consumption increased by less than 4% since 2004 (but is down 19% since 2001). Water consumption per unit sales decreased by 3% since 2004 (23% since 2001). This means we met our 2005 target to cut water use per unit sales by 10%. This is mainly due to consolidating primary manufacturing sites following the merger in 2000, and outsourcing some fermentation processes.

We have introduced water conservation measures. For example, our site at Thane, India, won one of the CEO's EHS Excellence Awards for its water conservation measures (see below) and similar projects were submitted by sites in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Poland and Canada.

Note to water use charts review
Water use includes water sourced from wells/boreholes, municipal and other sources (mainly wastewater from external industrial sources).

The data include water used in manufacturing processes and for general sites uses, as well as water incorporated into products

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