Danone and Veolia recently formed an innovative alliance in view of optimizing natural resources management. The partnership covers all aspects of the water cycle, waste management, sustainable agriculture and energy efficiency.
”At Danone we have three strategic resources: milk, water and plastic. We want to be able to manage these resources in a circular way, through recycling and leaving the smallest possible environmental footprint”, summarizes Pascal de Petrini, Executive Vice President of Strategic Resource Cycles at Danone. Danone’s goal is to halve its carbon emissions by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2050.
This partnership concerns Danone’s 170+ factories and their environment located all over the world, within its five divisions: Fresh Products, Early Life Nutrition (ELN), Waters, Medical Nutrition and Africa.
The project will be deployed gradually: 10-15 sites will be studied yearly, concrete solutions for improvement will be identified, and pilots will be initiated. The aim is to find solutions that are adapted to the sites’ need and that can be replicated to the rest of Danone’s facilities.
According to Laurent Panzani, Global Director of Food & Beverage at Veolia, “our goal is to unite all the Veolia expertise in order to help the Danone teams to achieve the ambitious goals they have fixed. VWT’s technological expertise combined with the global offer from Veolia will foster innovative solutions to contribute to a successful performance at the Danone sites (lower energy & water consumption, better valorization of all waste types) and to also benefit all those associated with the site ecosystem upstream and downstream (raw materials suppliers, farmers, consumers, communities nearby residents, etc.).”
For Bruno Valla, VP Alliance Deployment at Veolia “it’s more than just a business partnership; with Danone we share the same values in wanting to create and develop circular economies around industries and municipalities. These common and strong values act as an incentive to further optimize the resources sustainability. Ultimately, Danone should reach its environmental goals faster with the benefit of our technologies and expertise. At the same time, we will enhance the circular economy ecosystems by supporting social & economic initiatives with our organization and network.”
VWT supports the success of the alliance thanks to its technological expertise in the food & beverage industry and its global coverage. VWT has already implemented many solutions worldwide helping industrial clients to better manage the water resource, such as “Zero liquid discharge” systems, reclaim solutions, cow water recovery systems, production of biogas from wastewater effluent, etc.
On top of this, VWT will support Danone in the industrialization of its water treatment so that they may be applied to different countries. In working on these joint projects with Danone, VWT fully exploits its ability to offer standardized solutions thanks to its unrivalled technological portfolio and geographical coverage, with local subsidiaries able to offer their expertise to the Danone sites located close to them.
“It’s very motivating working with the Danone teams on global solutions. There is a real drive from the client to care about the water resource, and go beyond the traditional market expectations. We started with some audits at Danone Early Life Nutrition sites in order to optimize the consumption in their current or future plants and our recommendations are suitable for rehabilitating existing equipment or setting up a reuse solution”, says Audrey Bachelay, Business Development Manager at VWT, Markets & Offers Development department.