Reducing the Impact on the Environment

Veolia Water endeavours to control the impact from the businesses that its clients have entrusted it with. It uses its Environmental Management System (EMS) to implement its policies in the areas of the environment and public health.

It is also in this capacity that Veolia Water has a policy of optimizing energy consumption in its facilities. The company endeavours, whenever it is financially and technically possible and sustainable, to produce and use renewable energy at the facilities that it designs and/or manages.

In addition, there have been pilot initiatives on several sites in order to measure the positive impact on the natural environment. This is primarily the case with initiatives looking at protecting and conserving biodiversity or rehabilitating sites.

Veolia Water's wastewater treatment services generate sewage sludge as a matter of course. This sludge goes through several treatment processes such as their bacterial "digestion", dewatering or lime conditioning.

These processes or a combination of several of them make it possible to significantly reduce their volume, the pollution which they might create (primarily odour pollution) as well as reduce the dangers that they could present to health and to the environment. In the case of digestion, the sludge can be the origin of renewable energy production of a site. Indeed, the biogas coming from the digestion can be transformed in electricity or used for heating.

After treatment, the sludge is subjected to various types of reuse (agricultural recycling by being spread on cultivated fields or through composting; waste to energy through incineration in heat production plants etc.) or placed in a technical landfill center, where they help to produce biogas, which can be reused to produce energy.