There's increasing pressure on fresh water around the world, and we are committed to both reducing our overall water consumption and looking for ways to reuse water multiple times.
Our target is to reduce our water consumption by 10% by 2030.
Where we are
- We’ve switched to low-flow showers and taps in all our lodges, reducing the amount of water we use
- Our Forest House building has a substantial rainwater harvesting system in place
- Several of our villages have on-site water treatment plants, which treat greywater and sewage before it’s discharged
- The quality of the water discharged from our villages is carefully controlled by discharge consents, granted by the Environment Agency, which set strict limits on the quality of the water suitable for discharge
- Our pool water is filtered and recycled. Each night, it’s drained down into large buffer tanks, to conserve heat, and recycled back into our pools the next day via filtration and treatment systems
Where we're going
- We’re looking to partner with specialist water consultants to conduct in-depth water audits across our villages to analyse further infrastructure and operational changes we could make to reduce our water use
- Water companies estimate that 5-10% of toilets in the UK leak. We’re working with our Housekeeping teams to quickly identify leaky toilets in our lodges and make sure they’re fixed as soon as possible
How we're doing
We’re aiming to reduce our mains water use by 10% by 2030.
As a business with swimming at the core of our offering, we’re very conscious of our water consumption and we work hard to make savings wherever we can, focusing on the principles of reusing and recycling water.
Figure 1 shows total water consumption for our UK and Ireland operations. Water consumption in our UK operations increased to above the baseline in FY25 and has been increasing in Ireland since FY22. This will be a focus area for us in the coming year.
Figure 1: Stacked bar chart showing water consumption in m3 for our UK and Ireland operations
Figure 2 shows total water consumption for our UK operations and monitors progress against our 2030 target. We need to reduce our water consumption by much more to ensure we meet our 2030 target. To date, we’ve actually increased our water consumption by 1% compared to our 2020 baseline.
Figure 2: Bar chart showing water consumption in m3 for our UK operations
- Figures for FY20, FY21 and FY22 were affected by closures of the villages and operational restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic and therefore do not reflect a typical year of operations.
- Figures for FY20 have been adjusted to account for 35 days of closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic – this adjustment allows us to reasonably set FY20 as a baseline year for our targets, ensuring we reflect a typical operating year.
- Due to the timing of when Center Parcs Longford Forest (in Ireland) opened, and the closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic, FY24 was the first full year of figures for our Ireland operation. With this in mind, we haven't yet set targets for our Ireland operation and so our water consumption target solely applies to our UK operations at this time. We are committed to making real reductions to our water consumption and we hope to be able to set targets for our Ireland operation soon.
- FY20: 1,494,326 m3
- FY21: 914,753 m3
- FY22: 1,290,461 m3
- FY23: 1,500,969 m3
- FY24: 1,452,760 m3
- FY25: 1,514,937 m3
Ireland
- FY20: 122,961 m3
- FY21: 102,195 m3
- FY22: 144,988 m3
- FY23: 178,194 m3
- FY24: 193,491 m3
- FY25: 197,694 m3
The chart shows the amount of water used in our UK and Ireland operations in m3. There is a large dip in FY21 (attributed to the impact of closures due to the pandemic). The figures for our UK operations increased from FY21 to FY23, when the FY20 baseline was surpassed. Although they reduced to below the baseline in FY24, in FY25 they rose to the highest level since FY20. The figures for Ireland operations have continued to increase and surpassed the baseline figure in FY22, FY23, FY24 and FY25.
- FY20: 1,494,326 m3
- FY21: 914,753 m3
- FY22: 1,290,461 m3
- FY23: 1,500,969 m3
- FY24: 1,452,760 m3
- FY25: 1,514,935 m3
- FY30 target: 1,336,786 m3
The chart shows the amount of water used in our UK operations in m3. There is a trend line from FY20 to FY30 showing that a reduction of 148,532 m3 is required to meet our FY30 target. There’s a noticeable reduction in FY21 (attributed to the impact of closures due to the pandemic) before increasing to a point above the target line in FY23, dropping down to close to the target line in FY24 and increasing to above the target line again in FY25.
