A Message From Our Chief Sustainability Officer
Watts Journey to Sustainability
Welcome to our ninth annual sustainability update. We not only celebrated 150 years as a company in 2024, we also made remarkable progress with respect to our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy, embedding sustainability into strategic initiatives and finding new ways to create shared value for our many stakeholders. We maintain our unwavering commitment to good governance, ensuring that all decision-making is grounded by our mission, vision, and values.
In last year’s update, we established our second generation of measurable and time-bound goals across the four pillars of our strategy — Footprint, Handprint, Social Responsibility, and Corporate Governance. Work to achieve our new targets is well underway. I’m proud of how teams from across our business have come together to embrace these challenges.
For more than a decade, we have actively tracked and managed our performance across water, carbon emissions, and waste. Our reporting of footprint data dates back to our first sustainability update in 2016, providing transparency for our stakeholders and holding us accountable for our commitments. In 2018, we adopted quantifiable, time-bound performance goals. Our first-generation goals covered a five-year performance period of 2019 – 2023 and aimed to achieve 3% annual reductions in water, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and hazardous waste intensity against a 2018 baseline. By the end of 2023, Watts had achieved a 62% reduction in water intensity, a 60% reduction in market-based emissions intensity, and a 35% reduction in hazardous waste intensity — far surpassing our stated goal of a 15% reduction over five years.
In 2024, we began working toward our second generation of Footprint goals. For GHG emissions, we have begun tracking our performance against an absolute reduction target of 30%, which is equivalent to 10,000 metric tons (MT), by 2034. For water and hazardous waste, we will continue to strive for a 3% intensity reduction year over year through 2026, using 2023 as our baseline. After achieving significant intensity reductions from 2018 to 2023, particularly for water intensity, these second-generation goals represent aggressive new targets that will require even more innovation, detailed management, and targeted capital investments.
Our teams are promoting awareness of our priorities and sharing knowledge across sites to apply best practices and key learnings. New investments in renewable energy, operational efficiencies, and improved processes led to a 950 MT reduction in our absolute GHG emissions. We achieved a 16% reduction in our hazardous waste intensity in 2024 as compared to 2023.
Safeguarding water for future generations is at the core of what we do at Watts. It’s for this reason that, after far surpassing water intensity goals by the end of 2023, we challenged ourselves to maintain a 3% annual reduction through 2026. We are nearing the point where all water used in our operations is critical. We will never compromise on providing access to safe water for our employees and ensuring that the processes we use to safely bring new products to market are less water intensive. In 2024, we enhanced monitoring and continued to improve operational efficiencies, which laid the groundwork for identifying and pursuing long-term water reduction projects.
As we actively managed our footprint and generated savings across operations, we helped our customers do the same. Our continued work to conduct life-cycle assessments (LCAs) for our products and publish environmental product declarations (EPDs) to share the results of those LCAs is driving transparency for our customers and contributing to global sustainable development efforts. Our engineering teams are gaining a deeper understanding of each product’s environmental impact and identifying opportunities to enhance manufacturing practices and product design.
This update is a reflection of an increasingly rigorous management approach to our ESG priorities. We are on a path of continuous improvement and thank you for taking the time to learn more.
Sincerely,
Kenneth R. Lepage
General Counsel and Chief Sustainability Officer
“We have taken significant steps to ensure sustainability is ingrained in our culture, business practices, operations, and the way we engage with our communities.”
Kenneth R. Lepage
General Counsel and Chief Sustainability Officer