Bunge Global SA

Bunge Global SA is an agribusiness and food company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with main operations in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1818, Bunge is now a major player in grain trading, oilseed processing, food ingredients, and agricultural supply chains. The company works with farmers, food manufacturers, animal feed producers, and biofuel markets. Greg Heckman is the CEO. Because Bunge depends on agriculture, crop processing, and global supply chains, water use is central to its ESG performance.

One of the success stories concerning Bunge Global SA's water risk management practices is the wastewater recycling facility constructed in Thrace, Turkey, in 2025. The project involved treating effluent from the facility to achieve the desired standards of purity. Even though the existing wastewater treatment plant had been designed to discharge sewage complacently, the resulting water still contained impurities to be used in the cooling system. An advanced automated system was constructed to treat and recycle the used water with the use of disinfection, oxidation, multimedia filters, ultrafiltration, and reverse osmosis. This way, the facility was able to create a closed-loop water system that would save significantly on the consumption of freshwater. The project improved water quality by decreasing the conductivity by more than 92%, total hardness by 84%, and total suspended solids by 97%. It also resulted in producing 55% of the required water for the facility in comparison with the previous levels of water use. The purification system provided 7.5 cubic meters per hour of filtered water free of impurities and scale for the cooling towers. Overall, the project decreased the use of freshwater by 40,000 cubic meters annually and reduced the strain on the freshwater source.

In general, Bunge has been successful in terms of water risk management and responding to ESG performance. It signed the CEO Water Mandate in 2015 and implements a risk-based water management strategy based on the water stress index from WRI Aqueduct. As a result, the company decreased its intensity of freshwater withdrawal by 17.9% per year since 2016 and has a goal to achieve a 17.9% decrease by 2025. In the regions facing water scarcity, the decrease was 13.6%.

Following the merger with Viterra in 2025, Bunge started developing a new third-party water-risk assessment tool to be used for its own operations and agricultural commodities. Bunge's water stress assessment covers the physical, climate, social, and regulatory water risks that apply to its business. It includes such physical water risks as water stress, scarcity, and declining water quality, among others. To manage water risk in the agricultural commodities sector, the company provides third parties with the information on water quality, quantity, and climate risks and promotes its regenerative agriculture programs to produce commodities with lower water impact. In its sustainability reports, Bunge mentions "areas at water risk, including areas of high-water stress" without providing separate quantitative data on the latter metric.