Business Overview 2009 (pdf - 6.8MB) - Veolia Water

Interview /
Veolia Water is thoroughly
equipped to help its clients reduce
their carbon footprint.
Against this backdrop, how did Veolia Water
fulfill its role in managing water issues in 2009?
We remained focused on the question of access to basic
services for all. It was, and, as I see it, still is a priority. Veolia
Water is committed to doing its share toward achieving the
Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of
people without access to safe drinking water and basic
sanitation by 2015, and we continued to support authorities
in achieving ambitious service or connection targets.
Where local government makes water a priority, Veolia Water
has the resources and expertise to meet expectations. That is
the case in Morocco, where, for the past seven years, our work
in building equitable and efficient water service has also saved
the equivalent of the water consumption of a city with a
population of 800,000. Our work in that country continues,
and we have asked MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) to evaluate the impact of the system of subsidized
connections we introduced there.
Besides fulfilling our obligations under our public service
management contracts, we continued our actions to ensure
access to water in poor rural areas. In Bangladesh, our first
drinking water production plant was inaugurated in Goalmari
by Antoine Frérot and Professor Muhammad Yunus, the
co-founders of the Grameen Veolia Water joint venture.
To identify the areas for improvement and be able to replicate
the experience elsewhere, Veolia Water signed an agreement
on a research partnership with the ESSEC business school’s
Institute for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship at the
start of 2010.
How is Veolia Water’s work progressing on
reducing pressure on water resources?
Making water sustainable, in other words, satisfying
increasing needs while sustainably preserving water, is our
other major priority.
For the increasing number of clients that are interested in the
notion of saving water, we have stepped up our efforts in
combating wastage. Our expertise in network efficiency,
management and leakage reduction has led to significant
improvements around the world. It has also enabled us to
embark on new avenues, such as tracking drinking water
quality. This involves analyzing flows at different points with
sensors installed in the networks, so that clients can be
informed of risks and corrective action taken quickly.
In all our contracts, demand management is also a way of
saving water and in 2009, Veolia Water made a point to
advise its clients on managing demand. Over the past
20 years, we have built up solid expertise in individual
metering and have been recognized for this expertise in
France, with official accreditation for Sade’s metering
department to manage meters for public authorities.
Based on this know-how, Veolia Water does its utmost to offer
its clients more-efficient services and innovative information
management tools that enable them to control their
consumption. That is how remote meter-reading, a newgeneration
service that continuously and from a distance
collects and transmits information from a water meter,
has become a reality in Metz, Deauville and Beaune.
In some cases, as in Paris, the fact that we had an excellent trackrecord
did not prevent the authorities from reverting to
municipal management of the water system. That’s just how
competition works, and, while some people are quick to forget
it, the same rules apply to competition between contracting to
private companies and management by the public sector. Be that
as it may, our teams did fantastic work there for 25 years, and
I wanted to call attention to that fact and thank them publicly.
10 Veolia Water 2009