6 billion plastic bottles avoided in 2025 because people around the world chose BRITA filtered water instead of bottles. Every bottle avoided reduces the material, transport and disposal the equivalent single-use bottle would have required. The figure is recalculated and updated every year.

BRITA measures product impact through the Planet Contribution, an indicator treated as equal to turnover and profit in monthly management reporting. Its Product Impact component counts how many 1-litre plastic bottles are replaced each year through BRITA filtered water – based on cartridges sold, their filtration capacity and market research into drinking habits. Where assumptions are required, they are deliberately conservative.

Since 1992, BRITA has operated a filter cartridge take-back and recycling programme in many countries. Recovered materials, such as ion exchange resin, carbon or plastics, are either reused in our own products or recycled and returned to the material cycle if technically feasible. Find out more and how to return your cartridge here. In 2025, 22% of the ion exchange resin used in BRITA's production came from returned cartridges.

BRITA works with partners whose work extends the mission beyond its own products – for example the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, whose Blue Recovery Fund supports the restoration of 100,000 hectares of wetlands in the UK. The criterion is substantive fit: a partnership must produce outcomes BRITA can document, not only visibility. Current partnerships are covered in the Partnerships & Movement stories.

Not all of them. The strategy period from 2021 to 2025 closed with a mixed record: returned ion exchange resin reached 22% against a 20% goal, virgin-plastic reduction reached 6.4% against a 30% goal, and packaging savings reached 2,361 of a planned 5,000 tonnes. BRITA publishes these results in full – including the targets it missed – and the stories here draw on that record.

BRITA has committed to reaching net-zero by 2050 and submitted its reduction targets to the Science Based Targets initiative, which validated them in May 2026. A dedicated Net-Zero Board, established in 2024, embeds the targets across business functions and reviews progress regularly. Progress is published annually.

BRITA manufactures at its headquarters site in Taunusstein and at the Bad Camberg plant in Germany, alongside further production sites including the UK and China. Returned cartridges are processed in Taunusstein, where the recycling programme has run since 1992. Stories in People & Origins look inside these sites and the people who run them.

Impact Stories are written by BRITA's editorial team, with the author named on every article. Each figure is checked against a primary source before publication – chiefly BRITA's annually published reporting – and where a number cannot be verified, it does not appear. Where a result depends on methodology or assumptions, the story names them.