There are number of strategies and initiatives that can help to deliver the reduced water consumption. The challenge is to identify those initiatives offer the best return on investment.

From both local and global perspectives, accurate measurement plays a crucial facilitating role in identifying accurate usage patterns, enabling targeting water reduction initiatives, reducing waste and monitoring the ongoing progress of water reduction initiatives.

The water footprint of a business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services produced by that business, including both direct and indirect water use. For many organisations the UK operational water footprint will be only a very small percentage of the total water footprint, with the largest portion likely to be accrued in the agricultural production of raw materials, followed by the manufacturing process.