We’re years behind in energy recovery and waste management

Global chief says the momentum is growing for sustainable practices around the world.

Estelle Brachlianoff, Global Chief Executive Officer of Veolia.

Australia is many years behind the rest of the world in terms of energy recovery, recycling and policy, according to the global chief executive of giant water and waste management and energy conglomerate the Veolia Group.

Estelle Brachlianoff says while we have turned the corner with our commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, “it’s something quite new compared with other countries”.

She suggests we should prioritise decarbonising the economy and developing a circular economy, but says it’s a “glass half full” in Australia, where momentum for sustainability is growing.

On a trip to Australia, the boss of the organisation that employs 220,000 people around the world says Veolia predicts great growth potential for its technology and services in Australia, saying the “ecological transformation” could create an extra 25,000 jobs across the nation.

“We need to act and to speed up,” Brachlianoff says. “And the big (advantage) of having a worldwide company like Veolia is we already have the solutions available, we have the talent, we have the experience, we have the technology, we have the know-how.”

She says decarbonisation needs investment, a clearly stated policy framework, “an industrial company like ours to actually implement the scalable solution, and you need the population to be on board”.

Brachlianoff says there is a momentum for change around the world, and she cites a recent Veolia survey of 24,000 people in 24 countries, including Australia, that found “the population understands we have to act, they’ve understood that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of acting now, they want us to talk to them about the solutions”.

“We’re not here to do politics, we’re here to help with technologies and know-how (with) solutions that we have now,” she says. “So instead of waiting for the ones which we may invent in 10 years, what about starting with ones we already have at our disposal?”

She says although private companies have the innovation and technological solutions, that does not mean “everything needs to be privatised”.

“You need a global framework, and the objective as a country, as a city, has to be set by politicians and elected members,” she says.

“It’s for us (at Veolia) to transform those objectives into real projects, with deliverables. So the big thing for us is about partnerships and we bring know-how and expertise and technologies and worldwide scale but we wouldn’t be able to do that without elected members to set the framework.”

France is Veolia’s home country and 20 per cent of revenue comes from there, with another 40 per cent in Europe outside France, and 40 per cent outside Europe, in countries such as the US, Australia and Japan, as well as China.

The 2022 revenue of almost €43bn ($70bn) was up 50 per cent year on year, with about two-thirds of that lift due to the acquisition in February of public utility company Suez and the rest coming from organic growth. Its revenue in Australia was $3bn.

The chief executive is pleased with those numbers, but even prouder, she says, that “we’ve helped reduce by 14 million tonnes of carbon our customers’ footprint last year”.

Veolia has a big interest in dealing with water scarcity, a problem that Brachlianoff says should be tackled in the three key areas of water usage: agriculture, which accounts for about 70 per cent of water used globally; industry (20 per cent); and human use (10 per cent).

“Water sobriety, as in consuming less water to produce the same products, is something we’re very good at and we can recycle water almost infinitely,” she says.

She cites the example of soda drink manufacturers in the US which once used six or eight litres of water to produce one litre of soda but have cut that to 1.4 litres of water per litre of soda.

City “water sobriety” requires a mix of effort to avoid domestic water wastage and deal with network leaks that could lose between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of water, she says.

“That’s a quite common statistic that we can improve with artificial intelligence and digital sensors to detect the leaks,” she says.

“And then there’s the reuse of wastewater for agriculture, for industry, for cleaning the streets or even up to drinking water.”

Veolia also has begun a project to recycle electric vehicle batteries by extracting the three “strategic” or critical minerals of lithium, cobalt and nickel.

They are strategic because “you cannot find them in many countries and you don’t want to be dependent on other countries to import them”.

The extraction process is complex – like unscrambling an egg, according to Brachlianoff – but Veolia has spent a decade developing the technology to do so and has plants in France and China, and is looking to build another in the US.

Brachlianoff, the first woman to head Veolia, was appointed chief executive in July last year after 17 years at the company.

She says she manages such a huge company only by “counting on her team”.

She is responsible for big-picture settings for the global company, such as where to allocate resources. But one of her first decisions as chief executive was to ensure workers across the globe received the same basic benefits in terms of maternity leave and health insurance, for example, irrespective of local labour rules. The approach is to allow the offices around the globe to be “operationally self-sufficient”, with the C-suite adding value on global-wide issues.

Brachlianoff says Veolia employees across blue and white-collar jobs express an interest in the purpose of the company.

“People want to work for a company which has a purpose, I think, and that is what we see in all the engagement surveys we do internally,” she says. “Everybody is really on board with that. They want to believe their job is useful – to help the planet to be greener is something which is useful.”

Brachlianoff says much of Veolia’s work cannot be done remotely and staff need to be physically present. Although its office jobs have some flexibility, she says, “I really believe we need people to be physically together to share even coffee or tea, in order to be brainstorming”.

So, while the company has adapted to more flexible practices compared with a few years ago, the boss says she prefers to see employees working from home on only one or two days a week.­ Otherwise, she says, workers can lose their link with the company.

She says the “ecological transformation” of the global economy will create jobs because, for example, it takes “eight times more jobs to recycle a water bottle rather than to send it to landfill”.

“We’ve estimated in Australia it corresponds to 25,000 jobs,” she says. “And it will be everything from engineers, technicians, maintenance guys, to chemists, artificial intelligence specialists down to operatives to recycle.”