In 2025, the use of BRITA products replaced around 6.1 billion single-use plastic bottles worldwide – 400 million short of the company’s own target. This is the story of how that number is counted, why it is published either way, and what changes by 2030.
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Somewhere in BRITA’s monthly management reporting, alongside turnover and profit, sits a third figure: the number of one-litre plastic bottles that were never bought. In 2025, that figure reached around 6.1 billion – bottles replaced worldwide because people drank filtered tap water instead of bottled water. The company had aimed for 6.5 billion. It reports the shortfall as plainly as the achievement, in its Sustainability Report 2025, because the number is treated as a management metric, not a marketing line.
The figure has a name: Product Impact. Since 2020, it has formed one half of BRITA’s Planet Contribution – a key performance indicator the family-owned company from Taunusstein, Germany, considers equal to turnover and profit. Every month, it lands on the Executive Board’s desk next to the financial results. The counterpart is the Company Carbon Footprint, the greenhouse-gas ledger of the business itself. One number measures what the products avoid; the other measures what the company emits. Together they put a figure on both sides of the company’s environmental account.
Counting bottles that never existed is not trivial, and the method matters more than the headline. The calculation draws on the number of relevant filter cartridges sold, the product-specific filtration capacity of each, and consumer research on how far filtered water actually replaces bottled water in daily habits. Where assumptions are required, BRITA states they are deliberately conservative, and the underlying data is reviewed and updated regularly. In a period when environmental claims face more regulatory scrutiny than ever — the EU’s rules against generic green claims among them – a published methodology is what separates a verifiable figure from a slogan.
The 2025 result closes one chapter: it was the final year of the company’s first sustainability strategy, and the bottle target was one of the goals it set in 2020. What the number shows, what it leaves out, and why the next target is eight billion – that is best read the way BRITA now reports it: openly, year by year.
How do you count a bottle that never existed?
The mechanics are straightforward to describe and demanding to maintain. BRITA counts the relevant filter cartridges sold in a year, multiplies by each product’s filtration capacity, and then applies what customer surveys and market research show about substitution – how far a household that filters actually stops buying bottled water. The unit is the one-litre single-use bottle. Where the data forces an assumption, the company says it chooses the cautious end of the range, and the inputs are reviewed and updated regularly as part of standard reporting.
Just as important is what the figure does not pretend to be. It is a modelled estimate of avoided consumption, not a laboratory measurement, and BRITA’s Sustainability Report – prepared along the lines of the GRI and ESRS frameworks – states openly that its contents have not been externally audited. Publishing the method next to the number is the point: readers can weigh both.
The year the target was missed
BRITA set the 6.5 billion mark in 2020, when the annual figure stood at four billion. The line has climbed since – 4.5 billion in 2021, five billion in 2022 and 2023, 5.6 billion in 2024, 6.1 billion in 2025. The target was narrowly missed, and the Sustainability Report 2025 says exactly that, in those words, before noting that 6.1 billion avoided bottles still marks a milestone: every bottle not produced saves the material, transport and disposal that would have come with it.
The bottle figure sits inside a wider scorecard from the company’s 2021–2025 strategy period, and the pattern of disclosure holds across it. The goal of cutting virgin plastic in the signature portfolio by 30 per cent ended at 6.4 per cent – reported as not achieved. The 5,000-tonne packaging-reduction goal reached 2,361 tonnes – reported as partially achieved. The 20 per cent target for regenerated ion exchange resin was exceeded, at 22 per cent. Hits, misses and near-misses appear in the same table.
Where the counted cartridges end up
A bottle avoided still leaves a cartridge behind, and that trail is older than most corporate recycling stories: BRITA opened its first take-back programme for used cartridges in 1992, at its Taunusstein headquarters. Returned cartridges are dismantled and their materials reused wherever possible. The ion exchange resin does the heaviest circular work — it can be regenerated many times over without losing quality, and in 2025 regenerated resin covered 22 per cent of the total volume used in production.
The other materials have found their own routes. Activated carbon goes back to suppliers for reactivation and is used in industrial applications. The fibreglass-reinforced plastic from professional cartridges is processed into components for the automotive industry. When a MAXTRA PRO household cartridge is returned, 99 per cent of its material is recycled. Among professional customers, a dedicated partner programme keeps the loop turning: with a return rate of around 58 per cent, more than 800,000 cartridges now come back each year.
The next number is eight billion
The target has already been reset. To mark World Water Day on 22 March 2025, BRITA launched its ‘Be a Gamechanger’ initiative and named the next figure: eight billion bottles avoided per year by 2030. The goal is anchored in the company’s 2030 strategy, ‘Inspiring Water’, which carries sustainability as one of its three pillars – so the bottle count remains a board-level number, not a campaign line.
The other half of the Planet Contribution is moving as well. Scope 1 and 2 emissions are down 34.3 per cent since 2020; certified green electricity covered 92 per cent of consumption in 2025, including every production site for filter cartridges. In May 2026, the Science Based Targets initiative validated the reduction targets BRITA had submitted on its road to net-zero by 2050. None of this restores the missed 6.5 billion. It sets the terms for the next five years: the count continues, and it stays public.
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Sources & further reading:
BRITA Sustainability Report 2025
Last reviewed: August 2026