Brazil: Saving water in Latin America

Challenging factories to save water

This was the message from the Brazilian government in 2001, urging its people to cut energy consumption by 20% or risk a total blackout. The lights had begun to flicker in Latin America's largest country, not because of oil shortages but because of drought.

Brazil depends almost entirely on hydropower for its electricity. Crippling drought throughout the continent – which continues today in many parts – led to power shortages and blackouts.

Unilever's top management in Latin America were determined that the company would play its part to relieve the drought-induced crisis. They issued this challenge to Unilever food factories in the region: "show me you can cut your water use by a million cubic metres in two years." That’s about 16.5% of their water consumption in 2002.

Project Medusa

This challenge marked the beginning of Project Medusa, which demonstrated that dramatic strides can be made by taking a number of small positive steps.

Water is especially significant in making food products. At the Goiânia factory, for example, fresh tomatoes are washed, skinned and cooked to make the popular Pomarola pasta sauces and Extrato Elefante tomato paste. Water is used to wash the fruit, clean the equipment and cool the machinery. In the past, the water evaporated during cooking was sent directly to the water treatment plant, but it is now used to wash equipment and for cooling.

It was at Goiânia, where Fabiano Vilela is the environment co-ordinator, that the two-year Medusa project was launched in 2003, with a meeting of managers from Unilever’s operations worldwide to share examples of best practice. The examples were grouped into three areas: mindware – training, awareness campaigns, posters, competitions and slogans; software – operating procedures and job instructions; and hardware – changes to equipment and recycling systems.

The overriding emphasis was to get everyone in the factories involved. At the end, Project Medusa has achieved a reduction in total water consumption of 7.9% and a 14.7% reduction in the load per tonne of production.

Read the full story by downloading the pdf in the links below.

Note: The pdf was written in 2005. The principles behind Project Medusa are now being used in other parts of Unilever to reduce energy use and cut waste. To find out more about our approach to reducing water consumption, energy and waste in our manufacturing operations, see the Environmental sustainability section of our online Sustainable Development Report 2007.