Water conservation remains a key focus for Massmart, particularly in light of the significant water security challenges currently impacting large parts of our country.
Although Massmart is not a significant consumer of water resources we recognise that water scarcity is a significant and growing social and business risk across sub-Saharan Africa, and with South Africa listed among the 30 driest countries in the world.
One area where we do use higher volumes of water is in our larger Makro stores and our Builders nurseries. To address this, we have implemented rainwater harvesting at 84 Builders and Makro stores to offset our municipal consumption. This harvested water is used primarily for irrigation in our car parks and in-store nurseries.
We also actively monitor water usage in real time, which allows us to identify leaks and instances of high consumption and create benchmarks for the optimal consumption of water in our stores. In 2019 we installed a centralised remote water meter and monitoring system across our Makro stores.
To help our customers reduce their consumption we sell cost-effective water-saving devices in our stores and estimate our customers reduced their water consumption by approximately 435,000 kL in 2020.
