Skills
Drinking Water
Veolia Water's primary responsibility is to produce drinking water and supply it to customers' homes.
Priority is therefore focused on the clean quality of the water to ensure the best possible water service, as expected by its municipal customers and by consumers.
Veolia Water's brief is to make water safe to drink.That is to ensure it complies with the health standards as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), European Union or by legislation passed in each individual country. At the same time it must improve the taste for the greater satisfaction of the consumer.
Veolia Water is required to supply water of uncontestable quality day in day out.
10th of Ramadan water treatment plant, Egypt
Wastewater
Wastewater services
Veolia Water is currently the leading company in the world for municipal wastewater services.
The Group primarily manages the networks and wastewater treatment systems for Berlin, Prague, Rabat, Durban, and Adelaide, and has been chosen to design, build and operate wastewater treatment plants and networks for the cities of Brussels and the Hague.
But it also still manages all different sizes of networks and treatment plants.It has developed a service provision for small local authorities aimed at managing the wastewater systems of those constituents who are not connected to the public wastewater system.
Aware that the efficient management of wastewater treatment services directly affects the economic development of local communities and also protects water resources, Veolia Water has developed a global approach to provide assistance irrespective of their size or the nature of their technical or regulatory issues
Wastewater treatment services
As with water services, wastewater treatment services, otherwise known as sanitation, is the responsibility of elected officials and local authorities.
In industrialized countries this service, essential for public health, has seen numerous developments over the last century and a half.
However it is a sector where improvements still need to be made for instance a tightening of standards in using or updating ageing facilities.
Within the European Union the directive no. 2000/60/CE states that the Member States must implement an action program with the aim of ensuring, within fifteen years, that surface waters are in a good chemical and environmental condition, and that there is sufficient groundwater in a good chemical condition.
From the very beginning the purpose of a wastewater system is to collect all domestic effluents and remove them from the center of towns and cities.
The wastewater is then treated in order to release it back into the natural environment where it completes the purification process.
Agricultural and industrial advances the diminishing and/or degradation of the resource as well as the tightening of standards has given this service an ever more important dimension.
Desalinating seawater
72% of the earth's total surface is covered in water. 97% of this water is saltwater. Almost 40% of the world's population lives within 70 km from the coast.
These figures show the importance of seawater desalination techniques in meeting some of the world's water requirements. Furthermore, desalination plants mean that water is produced from a local resource (no need to transport distant resources).
There are two main desalination technologies:
- thermal desalination - by vaporizing the water in distillation facilities, the water is separated from the salts that it contains;
- membrane desalination - this consists of passing the pressurized water through a membrane which lets the water pass but retains not only the salts but also bacteria and viruses.
Multiservices
Veolia Environment is the only company to operate in all environmental services: water, waste management, energy services and passenger transportation