Water pledge keeps on filling: HMSHost International and Made Blue begin work on second freshwater well

Right now, more than 844 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water. That is one in ten! In fact, some of these women and children need to walk around 6km each day for just 20L of water. Since 2014 HMSHost International has been partnering with Made Blue to try and make a difference - matching our water use in Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, by donating clean water to a remote community, litre for litre.

We’re now kicking off a project for our second freshwater well in a remote community in Asia! After the success of our well in the west of Bandung, Java, Indonesia, we’re following it up to scale up an existing water project in Vietnam’s Ba Thuoc district. You can check out this inspiring story in more detail here.

At the same time, HMSHost International has made complimentary steps to reduce the consumption of bottled water in their Dutch offices. By installing Made Blue water fountains in the corporate offices, associates can access cold, room-temperature, or effervescent water at the press of a button. This corresponds with the cessation of bottled water orders at all our Netherlands-based offices, translating to a saving of 50,000 plastic bottles from being wasted each year!

What does the litre-for-litre donation actually look like? For every beverage we sell we use water; not only in our facilities but also in the production process. Together with external auditors we calculate the water needed to determine our donation. It is roughly around 4L of water for every drink sold. In total we have been able to give an impressive one million cubic metres of clean drinking water for those in need over the past five years.