Manage water resources

The protection of water resources is necessary from a quality, quantity and economic point of view.

In addition to the attention given to industrial wastewater management, preserving aquatic ecosystems and preventing health risks require proper control of wastewater and stormwater collection processes, as they can constitute a significant source of pollution in the case of heavy rain. This also involves improved analysis of chemical and microbiological pollutants and their impact on drinking water production and on the environment downstream of wastewater treatment plants.

The depletion of available resources resulting from demographic pressure, global warming and anthropogenic pollution also requires the development of reliable, healthy and economical solutions to reuse wastewater and stormwater.

Finally, the better the quality of the water resource, the lower the treatment cost to make it drinkable.

Veolia Environnement, along with its Resource Management and Environmental Modeling team (GeRME), mobilizes an international network of experts (France, Germany, Australia, USA) for its research programs on the management of water resources. As our research relates to varied geographical sites, it responds to multiple local issues and contexts and can be transposed to many regions of the world.

The R&D programs we are involved in aim at:

• improving our knowledge of aquatic systems;
• providing water operators with the tools to help them control health and environment-related risks;
• developing the use of alternative water resources;
• offering differentiated services to the Group's clients.

In 2007 our work related in particular to:

• developing, for the operators of drinking water production plants, a two-dimensional tool modeling pollutant propagation in river water in order to deal with crisis situations;
• developing, for wastewater treatment managers, a tool for the "on-demand, real-time" forecasting of bathing water quality;
• testing a stormwater treatment process in the geological environment when this stormwater flows between injection and recovery boreholes;
• establishing a rapid cyanobacteria mapping system over a body of water via remote detection.

Load the fact sheet n°2: Manage water resources (R&D report 2007)