Water | Pilgrim's Sustainability Report

Our Commitment

Water use and water quality are priorities at Pilgrim’s and critical pillars in our sustainability program. We recognize that water scarcity is a major global issue and that water is critical to securing a consistent, high-quality global food supply. We embrace our responsibility to reduce water use and strive to improve our water stewardship efforts by monitoring use at each Pilgrim’s facility and prioritizing usage reductions, while preserving our high standards for food safety and sanitary conditions. We are also aware that some Pilgrim’s facilities are located in water-stressed areas and require a more strategic focus to ensure proper water management. Water quality is an important priority for us as well, and we continuously work to ensure all wastewater we discharge meets or exceeds all legal and internal quality standards.


Water Stewardship

At Pilgrim’s, water stewardship is crucial to our long-term viability. Companywide, our approach to water stewardship is defined at the corporate level, but individual goals are developed at each facility to ensure ownership and accountability. We work closely and collaboratively with federal, state and local municipalities to address complex issues and jointly develop sustainable solutions. Finally, every facility invests capital annually to make sure the facility stays in alignment with and committed to our Environmental Policy while appropriately addressing local challenges.

Water plays an important role in a safe food supply and is used every day in our facilities so that the highest food safety standards are met. To make sure our efforts to reduce water use do not compromise food safety, we work cross-functionally across our environmental, engineering, operations and food quality and safety teams when designing and implementing water reduction strategies.

Each of our production and further processing facilities has a wastewater treatment program specifically tailored to that facility’s discharge permit requirements. These site-specific programs have helped address noncompliance issues.

2020 Progress

We track both total water use and water use intensity (water use per lb. of finished product including by-products) to consistently identify opportunities for improvements, irrespective of changes in production. In 2020 across our global facilities, we used 13.5 billion gallons of water, drawing 75% of this water from public municipalities, 22% from groundwater sources and 3% from surface water, including streams. We are pleased to report that from 2019 to 2020, as a global company, our water use intensity decreased by 2%. From 2018 to 2020 our U.S. facilities have decreased water use intensity by 5%. In 2021, we will continue our focus on water, ensuring that we stay committed to reducing usage of this critical resource while maintaining our high food safety standards.

For our business units in the U.S. and Puerto Rico who participated in our 2020 goal setting, overall water use intensity increased 5% since 2015. This is largely due to increased overall water use for additional necessary food safety provisions, but we are working diligently to reduce our water intensity and have made water use a key performance indicator at our plants to help drive change. Our teams will continue to stay focused on improving water use efficiency.

In 2020, all of our facilities discharged wastewater according to applicable wastewater treatment permits. We maintain and, where needed, improve facilities and wastewater programs to be in compliance with permits, laws and regulations. Discharged water is measured for its overall quality at each facility to ensure it meets permitting requirements. The majority, 66%, of discharged water is sent to city-owned treatment centers, while 26% is discharged into non-municipalities, and 8% is used as land irrigation.