Waste management

Collection, the first stage in waste management, is increasingly becoming a question of logistics. Veolia is developing innovative solutions to make collection more efficient by limiting environmental impact and encouraging sorting at the source to increase recycling rates.

Urban integration and performance
Veolia is developing innovative technical solutions and forming partnerships with experts in order to provide its customers with multiple collection systems tailored to their regional and economic needs.
 
Since 2011 in France, Veolia has been developing vacuum collection systems (similar to the systems successfully installed in northern European countries) and providing other efficient and eco-friendly collection methods, such as the “hippomobile” horse-drawn collection service. The company is also using new compressed-air, green-fuel and hybrid-engine vehicles and developing alternative waste transportation modes, such as waterway and railroad.
 
In response to the new challenges faced by its customers, Veolia has redefined its products and services to better suit the requirements of each region –  the needs of dense inner city areas differ greatly from industrial and commercial areas and urban residential areas  for example –  while maximizing performance.

This approach makes it possible to tailor collection services to local needs through a combination of door-to-door collection, collection from central containers and reverse logistics solutions that meet the needs of both communities and businesses.
 
Reverse logistics
 “Loginwaste” is a reverse logistics or return logistics waste collection service introduced by Veolia in Nantes (France) in February 2014, in partnership with the Greater Nantes conurbation community, transporters and local retailers’ associations. This model has proved to be a win-win for all involved: retailers and small companies have packaging collected when it best suits them; transporters optimize their rounds by developing an additional service that makes use of the previously empty trucks on their return to base; Veolia collects recyclable materials; and the local authority supports a project that reduces urban congestion and maintains the city’s attractiveness.
 
Incentive pricing 
Veolia has developed incentive pricing that is proportional to the volume of residual waste collected from each household. This encourages sorting and recycling, reduces the volume of household residual waste, increases recyclable waste collection rates and helps limit service costs.


Solutions:

• Conventional collection of non-hazardous waste
• Pneumatic collection of household waste
• Alternative collection methods
• ​Reverse logistics: customized services for industrial waste collection

Urban cleaning services play an important role in maintaining the attractiveness of cities. Urban areas that depend on tourism are particularly vested in maintaining clean streets and public spaces, and have come to see urban cleaning as a key factor in promoting their image.
 

Cleanliness, performance and civic-mindedness
Veolia’s urban cleaning services are based on performance commitments.
These services, which can be provided 24/7, combine collection solutions using clean vehicles, cleaning services using latest-generation low-water and low-energy equipment, and on-demand collection services to combat waste dumping in public spaces.
Residents can use mobile apps to let the urban cleaning service know where waste has been dumped, in order to ensure a rapid response.
Awareness and communication programs are also available for cities to help raise community awareness about respecting their urban living environment. 


Solutions:

• Maintenance of public spaces
• Urban cleaning

The recovery of materials helps conserve primary natural resources by turning waste into replacement energy products. By developing recovery solutions that provide its customers with certified secondary raw materials, Veolia has become the benchmark producer of renewable resources.

WEEE
Veolia’s patented process uses several different technologies to identify and extract all plastic materials from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) before grinding them into 10-millimeter pieces. Veolia’s industrial solutions combine flexibility and diversity while ensuring exemplary treatment traceability and achieving high recovery rates.
 
Plastics
The industrialized sorting process developed by Veolia identifies, separates and certifies the various types of plastics.
Veolia is able to guarantee recycled plastic material purity rates that exceed 99%, allowing manufacturers to install closed-loop recycling that significantly reduces their raw material supply costs.
 
Material and liquid effluent recycling
Veolia offers recycling solutions for metallic sludge from the automotive industry that combine recovery of metallic fractions with regeneration of high-value machining oils.
In this same industry, Veolia has attained such high-quality results in the field of solvent regeneration that it can provide its customers with a comprehensive service: it supplies the products used in the paint shops, collects used solvents, and regenerates them for reuse.
 
Compost
In order to improve the quality of organic soil conditioners, Veolia applies the Aerocontrol process at the composting facilities it operates. This process speeds up compost maturation while ensuring a homogeneous fermentation process.

Solutions:

• Recovery and production of secondary raw materials
• Production of recycled materials
• Production of compost
• ​Solvent recycling

Veolia supports the growing demand for renewable energy and, wherever possible, develops solutions to supply green energy to its customers.
 

Heat
The energy generated by the combustion of non-recyclable waste produces electricity and heat for either local industry or domestic energy needs. Waste-to-energy therefore helps conserve fossil fuels, limit greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the volume of waste sent to landfills.
At all its waste-to-energy facilities, Veolia applies the standards established under European regulations, including compliance with threshold values for flue-gas emissions. 

Biogas
The development of efficient operational techniques and the systematic use of biogas have sharply increased the recovery of the biogas given off by waste fermentation. Veolia has patented an automated management system for biogas collection networks called Methacontrol®, which is used to continuously adjust the collection network’s operation. This process significantly increases the quantity of biogas collected compared with a manual adjustment method.
Veolia has also developed anaerobic digestion systems: dry for municipal waste, and wet for waste from the agricultural and food processing industries.
 
Solid recovered fuel
Veolia is involved in developing the sector for solid recovered fuel (SRF), also known as refuse-derived fuel (RDF). SRF is dry, non-hazardous waste that can be used as a fuel for co-incineration in facilities such as cement works furnaces. SRF provides a way to recover a significant fraction of municipal waste or non-hazardous industrial waste while at the same time meeting industry’s growing demand for energy.


Solutions:

• Biogas recovery
• Heat recovery
• SFR recovery 

The process of decommissioning industrial facilities and mobile objects (aircraft, ships, trains and oil platforms) at the end of their working life poses economic, health and environmental challenges that require two complementary forms of expertise: the ability to decommission and deconstruct a site or object for easier management, and the ability to recycle the resulting waste and clean up ground pollution. 
 

Backed by considerable expertise in both these areas, Veolia can offer decommissioning project management services to ensure a better environmental, health and financial outcome. It does this by more accurately anticipating how the waste generated by decommissioning and dismantling a site or object can be recovered and treated.
 
Veolia offers the full range of services that may be needed: logistics, deconstruction, asbestos removal, waste profiling and reduction in waste volume, recovery of recyclable materials, treatment of both hazardous and non-hazardous residual waste, soil remediation and site restoration, traceability and monitoring, and more.  




Solutions:

• Project management and engineering
• Dismantling
• Profiling of materials and liquid and solid waste
• Asbestos removal
• Materials sorting, packaging and recovery
• Hazardous waste management
• Treatment of non-recyclable waste
• Land remediation
• Site rehabilitation
• Water treatment
• ​Traceability and reporting 

By the very nature of its activities and organization, Veolia plays an active role in the community alongside regional governments, businesses and residents. As a multi-local business, Veolia ranks among the largest private local employers, and its workforce lives and works within the same community. This proximity to its customers not only helps Veolia respond more quickly to customer concerns, but is instrumental in strengthening ties between Veolia, municipal authorities and community residents.
 

A major force in bringing jobs to the community
In order to ensure optimal service quality, Veolia employees must be responsive to and thoroughly familiar with the regions in which they work. For that reason, Veolia draws its workers from the surrounding community. As a result, the company provides a boost to the local economy in each region where it operates.
 
Training and apprenticeships
Training is an important part of Veolia’s corporate culture, as reflected in its network of 21 campuses and learning centers in 12 countries. The company’s training policy is guided by two major principles:

• expand the skills of Veolia employees in the fields of logistics, waste-to-energy and recycling;
• help Veolia’s customers – both private businesses and local municipalities – grow and operate more efficiently.

Solutions:

• On-the-job training
• Management
• ​Transfer of personnel and skills management

When your disposal needs call for permanent, safe and efficient solutions, Veolia can provide you with what is today's industry standard in land disposal options. All approved landfill operations are sited, constructed and operated in a manner designed to provide the utmost in long-term containment of all such wastes.

We operate all over the world landfill sites which are run to the highest levels of operational and environmental efficiency and are monitored for up to thirty years after their working life.

Secure facilities
Landfill management is about far more than just the disposal of waste.  At Veolia we use the best available technologies to manage the waste and control associated operations such as energy recovery and leachate treatment.
The landfills operated by Veolia use the most advanced technologies. 
They employ damp-proof membranes, leachate (liquid residue) treatment systems and methane emissions capture.
 
A waste-to-energy source
Landfill’ sophisticated facilities are now able to produce, recover and recycle as much biogas as possible from available waste. That also prevents the biogas from escaping into the atmosphere and will make it possible to provide an alternative source of energy to be turned into heat, electricity, biofuel, natural gas, and even hydrogen in the future.

Non-stop environmental monitoring
All Veolia facilities are subject to strict environmental monitoring, from impact studies to site renovation and greenhouse gas emission limitation.
In collaboration with all our stakeholders, we aim to manage the natural habitat and minimize our effect on the local and wider environment. Once the site has reached the extent of its planning permit, we are responsible for capping it and restoring it – usually for natural conservation or public use.

Reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions
Actions to reduce and avoid greenhouse gas emissions are being implemented throughout our activities. In the landfills operated by Veolia, this results in the following actions:

• Install active landfill gas collection and treatment systems.
  That is 6,900 kt CO₂eq emission reductions.
• Use landfill gas as a fuel to produce electricity or thermal energy.
  Pennsylvania, USA, landfill gas is processed and converted into pipeline quality methane gas, which is injected into an interstate natural gas pipeline located near the landfill site.

 
The development of efficient operational techniques and the systematic utilization of landfill gas (flaring, electric power recovery by engines and gas turbines) have sharply increased recovery of the biogas produced by waste.
Veolia's Research and Innovation’ team has invented degassing techniques and an automated tool for managing collection networks. It is used to continually regulate the collection network's operation, taking into account various internal and external system parameters.
The process, tested under real-life conditions has yielded conclusive results. 
It increased significantly the landfill gas collected compared with a manual adjustment method.


Solutions:

• Producing renewable energy from landfill
• Bioreactor
• Biogas recovery
• minimizing the impact of waste in the environment