COVER STORY
veolia. com / en. Directly, Veolia works with municipalities in many third world countries to finance, build and operate water treatment plants providing clean water to the populations.
GN: What are the future innovations that you or your company pursuing? Froment: The past few years have presented many challenges for Veolia Water Technologies, with a market that has been rapidly changing and we ourselves now need to change and adapt. As Veolia Water Technologies, our wealth is made of our technologies and we will keep capitalizing on them, improving them and developing new ones. Meanwhile, we want to simplify our portfolio of technologies, making them available faster and at a more competitive price point. We are also looking into digitalization of some of our standard equipment. Another key point for us is to further develop our bundled services, for instance our mobile water services, traceability for specific regulations, digital functions, etc. There is a strong demand for these types of services and we want to better capitalize on that through our local teams. We are still relying on our strong design and engineering capabilities to secure some big design-andbuild contracts, for instance for desalination plants in the Middle East, municipal water and wastewater treatment plants in Europe, Africa and Asia, and industrial projects in North and South America.
GN: What impact have you delivered( social, economic and environmental)? Do you have metrics or statistics of your accomplishments? Froment: Here is an infographic of Veolia’ s accomplishments:( See figure A)
THE CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS GN: What are the greatest challenges in the water industry? What do you think the government, private companies and NGO of each country should do to get rid of this? How do we provide water accessibility to more than 7 billion people? Froment: Demand for raw materials, including water, is exploding as a result of demographic growth, rising living standards and climate change. As we are all aware, we cannot endlessly draw on the natural environment – a number of shortages are already making themselves felt and the growth model based on linear consumption( extract-use-throw away) has reached its limits. Scarcity of raw materials, scarcity of water, carbon footprint: these are huge challenges facing our world today. The management of environmental issues is becoming increasingly important and complex in
Figure A: Infographic of Veolia ' s Accomplishments
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SEPTEMBER 2016 Clean Water Technologies