It's 7:45 on BFM Business and AMC Live. Our guest this morning is Estelle Brachlianoff. Hello, you are CEO of Veolia, a global expert in collective services, covering water cycle management, waste recovery, and energy management. We have many questions to discuss this morning. We'll start with your news about this expansion in the United States. Clean Earth. You want to double in size in hazardous waste in the US. So it's in the US that you're expanding, a country that is no longer at the forefront on energy and decarbonization issues. There's a market for you there.
Yes, Veolia continues to grow fast and strong in the US and outside Europe, where we're already 80% international. This Clean Earth acquisition, 3 billion dollars, is the most transformative since the Suez acquisition three years ago. It allows us to double in size in hazardous waste in the US, surpass 6 billion dollars in that country, and become the number two player in the market — truly a national actor that will let us offer the full range of Veolia services: hazardous waste, meaning pollution treatment, but also water in all its forms, water for residents and for industry. And demand is very strong despite what's often called the environmental backlash at the political level. But demand for Veolia's services is just as strong in the US as elsewhere, driven by two fundamental trends. First, health concerns. No one in the US, any more than elsewhere, wants pollutants in their tap water. So pollution treatment will continue to have strong prospects in coming years, and that's Veolia's core business. The second trend is the reshoring of a number of strategic industries — microelectronics, data centers, and pharmaceuticals — all of which need hazardous waste treatment and water technology.
But in the US, being a European or French company and having public contracts with local municipalities — that doesn't pose a problem? At a time when Donald Trump says America First everywhere, don't people think they should choose an American company first?
In the US, we are an American company run largely by Americans, even though Veolia's headquarters is in France. And that's how Americans perceive us, which is great. Veolia is a multi-local company. We're German in Germany, American in the US, and obviously French in France. Second, we have enormous contracts not just with municipalities but with industrial clients. If you don't have water — if you're in Arizona and you've just built a brand new microelectronics factory — you simply have no factory. So water services from Veolia are an absolutely critical factor for industrial clients as well.
Speaking of water quality, it's an issue in the US, but also in some cities in France where tap water use was banned because there were too many PFAS. You've developed a technology. How does PFAS filtration work?
This is a great example of what I was saying — Veolia is not just multi-local but also global, which gives us the critical mass to innovate, invest in R&D, and find solutions. We now know how to handle PFAS end-to-end: filtration, concentration, and destruction using a wide range of different technologies. Depending on the type of PFAS and whether it's diluted in water or in soil, we use a very different portfolio of technologies.
But does that mean some municipalities will have your anti-PFAS technology and others won't, with very different water prices and perhaps a population that feels safer or not — as if you have a filter on your tap water?
Tap water is one of the most monitored products from a health standpoint, so your viewers can rest assured. It's monitored daily, hourly, constantly. That was already the case. After we conducted measurements for local authorities more than a year and a half ago, 99% of places where we operate water networks for Veolia had no PFAS — meaning it was below detection thresholds. And in the 1% of cases, we proposed solutions to local authorities, because once again, it's not Veolia that manages — we offer our services and technologies to elected officials. We've already deployed several PFAS treatment units in quite a few places across France.
You also want to become a major player in district heating. There's a huge decarbonization challenge, with a contract starting in Poland, in Poznań, the fifth-largest city in Poland. There, coal accounts for 60% of energy used for heating. That's enormous. There's a very important market for you. There was also a contract recently in Paris. Could you come to cities like Paris in the future?
We're already number one in Europe in district heating, very present in many geographies, including Poland with Poznań — a city of 600,000 inhabitants that historically used a lot of coal for heating. Thanks to our expertise and innovation, we just inaugurated a new facility that replaces coal with a range of other sources. And those other sources are essentially local energy: waste heat recovered from a nearby automotive plant, heat recovered from a data center, heat from the incineration of non-recyclable waste, and geothermal energy. All of this allows us to replace coal. We roughly halve the carbon footprint of this installation, and it's also much more resilient because instead of importing fossil fuels, you have local energy from right next door. Local energy is also a factor of energy sovereignty — and that's precisely what Veolia does. For those who think heat isn't talked about enough, they're right: it accounts for 50% of energy consumed in Europe, whether for heating homes or for industry. We need heat, not just electricity, and Veolia is a leader in the decarbonization of heat.
