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

Poland · Żywiec · See the Poland profile

Since 2008, Danone-owned Żywiec Zdrój's 'Po stronie natury' programme has planted over 8 million trees across roughly 1,000 hectares and restored around 63 hectares of species-rich meadow in Żywiec Landscape Park; water-retention monitoring with scientists began in 2025.

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

Details

Promoter
Żywiec Zdrój S.A. (Danone Group)
Period
2008-present
Keywords
bottled water, reforestation, meadow restoration, wetland restoration, catchment stewardship

Description

Żywiec Zdrój, part of Danone's water portfolio, draws its spring water from within Żywiec Landscape Park in the Beskid Mountains of southern Poland. Like 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.

Since 2008 the company has run 'Po stronie natury' ('On the Side of Nature'), planting trees, restoring flower-rich meadows and rehabilitating a wetland across the communes of Jeleśnia, Radziechowy-Wieprz and Węgierska Górka, working with local government bodies and conservation partners rather than through formal per-hectare payment contracts with individual landowners.

Over more than a decade the programme has planted upwards of 8 million trees across roughly 1,000 hectares (with a target of 10 million trees by 2026) and maintains close to 63 hectares of meadow under its 'Flower Meadows' strand, alongside more than 1,150 km of renovated hiking trails and an ongoing wetland-restoration project. 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.

Tree and hectare counts are company-reported, and — unlike the China and India cases in this batch — 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.

Read the full analysis: https://www.zywiec-zdroj.pl/biuro-prasowe/569/zywiec-zdroj-z-nowym-projektem-badawczo-edukacyjnym-miliony-drzew-hektary-lak-odtwarzanie-mokradla-w-zywiec-zdroj-dzien-ziemi-jest-codziennie

Read the full analysis: https://www.zywiec-zdroj.pl/biuro-prasowe/569/zywiec-zdroj-z-nowym-projektem-badawczo-edukacyjnym-miliony-drzew-hektary-lak-odtwarzanie-mokradla-w-zywiec-zdroj-dzien-ziemi-jest-codziennie

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

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