Water stewardship

Irrigation in agriculture

Globally, irrigation is at the core of water stewardship in agriculture. Within our industry, the quantity, quality, and timing of water availability through rainfall and irrigation all impact the growth of the tobacco plant. For about 60 percent of the farmland in our supply chain, the rain season is synced to the growing season, and so the crops are rain-fed during the open field stage. Where we use irrigation, we dedicate specific attention to the risk of baseline water stress when conducting local risk assessments. Irrigation accounts for around half of the water used to grow the tobacco we source, with an average of 307 m₃ of water employed per ton of tobacco produced in 2020.

In absolute terms, the total water requirement related to our purchased tobacco volume is gradually decreasing. As a result of climate change, we expect irrigation needs to increase in terms of intensity (water required per ton of tobacco produced).

Irrigation systems leverage different technologies depending on the local contexts, needs, and resource availability. Tropical countries typically use open-air channel irrigation, while in the Veneto region of Italy, for instance, highly efficient drip-irrigation systems are used to grow about 98 percent of the tobacco we purchase.

Precision irrigation through cutting-edge technology helps us to reduce water use. In 2020, we ran a pilot project in Argentina, where water-intensive flood irrigation is still widely used. Our aim is to switch to drip irrigation there, which we estimate could reduce our water consumption by more than 50 percent. In Italy, we have been trialing optimization technologies that guide the most efficient use of irrigation water. The end product will be a decision support system that, after testing, will be made available to our supply chain to scale up water efficiency at the tobacco landscape level. Further trials will be needed before we can estimate the impact of irrigation optimization. Still, we are hopeful that this is a tool we can leverage more broadly in the future. Pilot studies will continue in 2021 to determine which locations will benefit most from irrigation switches.

Farmers who diversify must also understand the water demands of alternative crops. We work with them to analyze crop-specific water use and to facilitate the transition to new crops by maximizing efficiency while monitoring the environmental impact. Learn more about this work here.

Water quality

When misused, crop protection agents (CPAs) and fertilizers can pollute the local environment. While CPAs protect crops and fertilizers improve crop yield, these chemicals can enter the groundwater or watercourses, impacting aquifers and aquatic ecosystems.

We have a global integrated pest management program in place to reduce the unnecessary use of pesticides, promote less hazardous alternatives, and manage both appropriately. Field technicians are key to achieving our goals. Their interventions improve pesticide and fertilizer management as part of our GAP program. For more information, see our biodiversity section.

Zero-loss mindset

We continuously work to improve our processes, invest in novel technologies, and raise awareness among our employees as part of our zero-loss mindset. Among other initiatives, we ran a 16-week accelerator program called Run to Target (RTT) in 2020 within our integrated facility management system. RTT is a way of working that fosters stability, reliability, and predictability in our operating processes to improve performance. It includes the setting of daily targets and monitoring at much tighter intervals.

In 2020, the RTT program ran in 32 of our 39 factories, involving over 6,000 employees trained to identify, assess, and eliminate losses. The daily monitoring of water consumption helped us to detect and remedy issues. For example, in Switzerland, quickly correcting an issue with an automatic valve allowed us to avoid the loss of 1,500 m₃ of water that would have occurred had we maintained monthly monitoring. In Brazil, we avoided a loss of 350 m₃ of water per month by quickly detecting a leak via daily monitoring. Overall, the deployment of RTT contributed to a 13.5 percent reduction in water consumption in 2020, equating to over 542,800 m₃ of water saved, as compared with the previous year.

Water and wastewater quality

Water quality plays a vital role in our operations. At our manufacturing sites, high-quality fresh water is used for WASH services, landscape watering, and manufacturing processes, including the preparation of flavors and liquid products. Good quality fresh water is also critical in the manufacturing of our smoke-free products, which will represent an increasing proportion of PMI’s product portfolio in coming years. PMI expects its direct dependency on water to increase as we continue to transition to RRP products, which require more water-intensive manufacturing processes. To reduce water dependency in the long term, we are implementing technologies and efficiency initiatives to recycle and reuse water at our manufacturing facilities. These technologies include reverse osmosis and electrode ionization.

The monitoring of wastewater quality is standard procedure at our manufacturing sites. We conduct sampling following recognized protocols to measure standard effluent parameters. Although we conduct some laboratory analysis internally, most is handled externally by accredited labs. Our certified environmental management systems help our sites to demonstrate compliance with current and future statutory and regulatory requirements associated with water discharge.

As part of our water strategy, we will progressively increase the number of parameters controlled and online measurements recorded at all our sites.