Żywiec Zdrój 'Po stronie natury' Watershed & Meadow Programme (Żywiec, Poland)

Żywiec Zdrój, part of Danone's water portfolio, draws its spring water from within Żywiec Landscape Park in the Beskid Mountains of southern Poland. As with other spring-water bottlers, the company's long-term supply depends on the water-retention capacity of the forests, meadows and wetlands in its recharge catchment.

Protect the recharge catchment's water-retention capacity by planting trees, restoring flower-rich meadows and rehabilitating a wetland, working with local government bodies and conservation partners across the communes of Jeleśnia, Radziechowy-Wieprz and Węgierska Górka.

Running since 2008 under the 'Po stronie natury' ('On the Side of Nature') programme, planting trees (with a target of 10 million by 2026), maintaining meadow restoration under the 'Flower Meadows' strand, renovating hiking trails, and rehabilitating a wetland. In 2025 the company began a research partnership to measure the water-retention capacity of the planted trees using field monitoring and satellite-image analysis, with results to be reported publicly on a rolling basis.

Over more than a decade the programme has planted upwards of 8 million trees across roughly 1,000 hectares and maintains close to 63 hectares of meadow, alongside more than 1,150 km of renovated hiking trails.

Tree and hectare counts are company-reported, and the programme's actual hydrological impact on the spring's water yield or quality has not yet been independently measured; quantified water-retention results are only expected once the 2025-initiated monitoring programme reports.