Water

Management and use of water resources

For an organisation like Brembo, which makes significant use of water resources, it has become truly essential to ensure that its production processes and operating sites use water in an efficient and responsible manner. Because of this, the Group has come up with its own strategy designed to foster rational use of this resource, progressively reducing its use and maintaining the original characteristics of the water supply sources, minimising the risk of contamination by potential pollutants that could harm the environment.

To be more specific, such strategy is implemented through the Brembo Energy and Environment Management System, whereby each plant carries out a risk and opportunities assessment for each process and production phase that has an impact on water resources. The outcome of this analysis leads — for the relevant identified risk or opportunity areas — to mitigation or other actions that may help seize any opportunities.

As far as water performance is concerned, approximately 1.2 million cubic meters of water were used overall, decreasing by about 8.6% compared to 2019. The water mains still constitute the main source of supply (approximately 74%) which not only ensures suitable quality levels, but also a reliably constant supply over time.

After being used for industrial purposes, i.e. for plant cooling, the production of cooling lubricant emulsions, etc., the water is mainly destined for the local water consortium sewers and only a tiny fraction is released into surface water bodies, after ensuring that the specifications on acceptability are met. With reference to waste water, nearly all of it is destined for the local water consortium sewers to which the sites are linked. Only a tiny fraction (about 2%) of waste water is released into surface water bodies, after ensuring that the relevant local legal specifications on acceptability are met.

It should be noted that throughout the year Brembo’s production facilities did not report any significant instances of leaks of hazardous substances into the environment.

Water Balance

In 2020, the E&E Department completed the ‘Water Balance’ project, aimed at assessing the water management level in all Group factories. With its final goal being that of offering improvement ideas, the project provided for the identification of wasteful practices, proper uses, infrastructure management, to then be followed by the identification of potential technical solutions enabling a more responsible management of water resources.

The following were verified during 25 site visits (2 conducted remotely):

• the adequacy of the infrastructures,

• the ability to prevent any type of contamination risk;

• the management maturity level of the water resource.

The project was supported by a water management expert to allow a homogeneous assessment in all the plants and identification of the areas for intervention with a view to a constant improvement in the management and use of the water resource. Each plant was requested to provide a roadmap designed to fill any gaps and the opportunities identified.

Future goals

Moreover, Brembo has anticipated its wider strategic goal — initially set to be achieved by 2025 — to reach by 2022 100% water flows monitoring capability (water withdrawal, disposal and significant internal use) for every site in the Group.

This goal aims at identifying every source of waste, and every abnormal level of consumption against internal and external benchmarks, to enable the implementation of improvement measures that are in line with local standards.

A further development of the project is the inclusion of water measurements within the BEP monitoring platform which — similarly to energy — will enable a constant monitoring of consumption, which in turn will be useful to identify priority areas for intervention.