How Do We Make Earth Day Every Day?
As we approach another Earth Day, let’s reflect on our recent impacts at Veolia Water Technologies & Solutions and support of Veolia’s ecological transformation. As a sustainability leader, I get an up-close look at our efforts addressing sustainability and ESG initiatives. Our employees have done outstanding work supporting our customers in achieving their environmental and economic goals.
Our employees collaborate, develop, and solve complex problems that not only make our customers safer, more reliable, and more productive, but also reduce their water use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and waste.
These efforts create a “handprint” that is important to measure along with our footprint. We have continued to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 GHG footprint and are working on accounting for Scope 3 GHG emissions. Our broad solution portfolio and different business units work seamlessly to implement solutions that improve our planet.
Here are three prime examples from my home country of Canada:
Increasing steam production sustainably
An oil sands upgrader in Alberta was experiencing steam shortages in winter months and needed solutions to prevent lost production without major capital projects and without increasing water or fuel consumption. Working closely with the customer’s technical and operational teams, Veolia proposed an operational solution that not only increased its available steam production, but also resulted in economic savings of over $23 million per year, GHG savings of over 182,000 metric tons of CO2e per year, and water savings of 339 million gallons per year. More information can be found here.
Creating renewable energy
Montreal set an ambitious climate goal to become carbon-neutral by 2050. The Montreal Biomethanation plant is a total solution that Veolia is providing the city to convert 60,000 metric tons of source separated organic (SSO) waste into renewable energy each year. The output is natural gas, a clean digestate that is combined with compost to form a usable soil amendment, and a clean wastewater effluent that is discharged to the local publicly owned treatment works. This holistic solution will generate over 120,000 gigajoules of renewable energy per year, saving over 67,000 metric tons of CO2e per year in GHG emissions, diverting almost 49,000 metric tons of SSO waste away from landfills each year, and treating over 159,000 cubic meters of wastewater per year within the biomethanation plant. More information can be found here.
Demineralizing to increase capacity
A mining operation was experiencing issues with its boilers, and affecting production rates. Working closely with the customer’s teams, Veolia audited the steam plant’s operations and delivered a mobile demineralizer system that allowed an electric boiler to operate at full capacity without impacting the mine’s production or requiring the use of the backup oil-fired boilers. This emergency mobile solution resulted in economic savings of over $1.3 million and avoided 5,500 metric tons of CO2e over the two-month project period. More information can be found here.
These success stories demonstrate the positive environmental and economic impacts that Veolia has on our industrial and municipal customers every day. Our handprint is actually much larger when you add in the thousands of other customers across the globe and the water and waste savings our solutions create.
I’m proud of the impact that our 10,000 Veolia employees have on our 50,000 customers each day, giving us a reason to celebrate progress on Earth Day. I’ll continue to challenge everyone to collaborate, partner, and implement solutions to make every day Earth Day and drive our collective ecological transformation.
