Number one in waste management

“We are entering the third era of waste,” considers Taisei Miura, Marketing Manager for Veolia Environmental Services. “Fifty years ago, we produced waste without any thought for its future. Next, we developed processing tools conceived to minimise environmental impact. Today, the aim is to recover waste, that is, to turn it into a resource. This need is explained both by the disappearance of natural resources and by a change in mentality, with companies embarking on a concrete phase of sustainable development, in developed countries at least. One of their goals is to do what is necessary for waste to be recycled and recovered.”
As the number one in waste management, Veolia Environmental Services
– one of the four divisions of Veolia Environnement – accomplishes 37% of its activity in France, 40% in the rest of Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavian countries, Italy and the Czech Republic) and 16% in North America.
The division employs over 92,000 persons throughout the world, with a little over 36,000 in France, while its 2007 turnover of 9.2 billion euros progressed by 23.5% compared with the 2006 figure. Out of its clients – 750,000 in 2007 – two-thirds are companies, half industries, half services, and one-third are local authority bodies.
The group’s two main activities consist in waste management from collection to recovery, via transfer and sorting; and on-site – services (industrial, tertiary or public sites) that include urban decontamination, cleaning, ground de-pollution. “Synergies exist between these two activities,” explains Taisei Miura. “When we come to a site to clean it, we proceed in an upstream manner by trying to organise more selective methods for waste collection, in order to prepare for waste recovery.”
For sustainable development is at the heart of the strategy of Veolia Environmental Services. The division envisages different modes of recovery: materials (recycling), agronomic and energy. As far as recycling is concerned, waste is transformed into secondary raw materials commercialised for end users. Other waste is used for energy recovery – energy is produced either from heat released by their combustion or from biogas emitted while the waste is stored. “The group thus avoids producing a total of 6.3 million tons of CO2 each year,” states Taisei Miura. “In 2007, we recycled 10 million tons of waste, up by 35% compared with 2006.”
Furthermore, a service has been developed specially for SMEs-SMIs, the “SME-SMI pack” available for all non-toxic solid waste and for all sectors of activity. “Purchasing waste management services is becoming more and more complex with recovery and the multiplication of possible options,” considers Taisei Miura. “In company expenses, waste is the area that has increased the most in recent years, after computers, notably due to the effect of increasing regulatory constraints. This is why we decided to offer SMEs-SMIs a simple, set-priced, comprehensive service, with the option of modifying the type of offer subscribed to in the first six months, depending on needs that may be identified. This offer also goes in the same direction as concrete environmental procedures adopted by a growing number of companies.”
Services included in the pack range from the provision of material adapted to the site, collection at a pre-defined frequency, transport, processing and recovery. Taisei Miura lists the offer’s advantages: “We guarantee a simple solution, a specific client relationship, perfect conformity with regulations, competitive prices – through the setting up of shared collection circuits that diminish costs – and recycling and recovery capacities adapted to their particularities. The main arm of our strategy consists in implementing more and more methods for recycling and recovery. Our industrial tool is therefore evolving substantially, a fact that enables us to stand out from many other players on the market.”