Veolia North America Releases Annual Sustainability Report

Veolia North America (VNA) recently released its annual Sustainability Report, featuring the results of Veolia’s program to set ambitious sustainability goals, which allowed their clients and communities to save energy, reduce waste and preserve precious natural resources.

This report features the results of the company’s various programs and initiatives, showcasing the work they are doing across over 500 communities to save energy, reduce waste, and preserve natural resources. The company also released a virtual, immersive version of the report, an online tool that brings “visitors” on a tour of their projects, allowing their work to come to life in an innovative and interactive way.

Veolia North America has made significant strides toward a number of sustainability commitments, including providing clean water, treating wastewater and managing

biosolids for nearly 25 million people in communities all over North America. VNA’s work keeps pollution out of the environment, protects public health, supports economic

development, encourages water reuse and increases resilience. As the world’s leading provider of water services and technologies: from treating and recycling water and wastewater for cities, to recovering valuable resources for industry, a few water highlights include:

• 18.1 million people served with water and wastewater services, with 1.3 BGD water treatment capacity managed and 2.2 BGD wastewater treatment capacity managed.
• Helping Clients Meet Drinking Water PFAS Regulations in New Jersey: VNA operates the water system in Rahway NJ under a professional operations services agreement. The Rahway Water Treatment Plant is a conventional, surface water treatment plant with an average daily treatment capacity of approximately 4.85 million gallons per day. In 2020, the State of New Jersey implemented a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 14 parts per trillion (ppt) for Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) and 13 ppt for Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) in drinking water, and required long-term treatment solutions to be in place within two years. In response to this timeline, local leaders turned to VNA to provide a cost-efficient treatment approach. Ultimately, after the town of Rahway and Veolia evaluated treatment alternatives, including the effectiveness of the existing granular activated carbon (GAC) for PFAS treatment, it was determined that the most cost-effective solution was the optimization of the existing GAC treatment process by replacing the media with a different GAC product better suited for PFAS treatment, and modifying the vessel’s underdrains to support the smaller mesh carbon.
• Recycling Wastewater for Beneficial Use in California: VNA operates and maintains the West Basin Municipal Water District’s Edward C. Little Recycling Facility in El Segundo, and uses different customer-tailored processes such as filtering, disinfection, removing ammonia, microfiltration and reverse osmosis, to treat the wastewater through varying levels of purification to meet the individual needs of the customers (needs include: industrial operations, irrigation, cooling tower processes, low and high pressure boiler feeds, and indirect drinking water).
  • The recycling of over 40 million gallons of wastewater a day at West Basin, including the production of 11 million gallons of “barrier water” (to recharge the West Coast Groundwater Basin and protect groundwater from becoming saline due to seawater intrusion) makes the plant the only treatment facility in the country that produces five different qualities of fit-for-purpose recycled water.
• In East Palo Alto, California, VNA collaborates with the city and state on an innovative program designed to bring relief for local water ratepayers who are struggling to keep up with their bills.

Experience the report to learn how Veolia North America actively protects the local peregrine population in Wisconsin as part of its work operating and maintaining one of the largest wastewater treatment facilities in the United States in Milwaukee, as well as its work deploying remote sensors on several of its municipal water and hazardous waste sites.