Suez prepares for the resource revolution

Suez-environnement
As SITA Australia becomes Suez, its Executive Director of Infrastructure in Australia, Emmanuel Vivant, talks about the direction of its operations, and his own aspirations for resource recovery in the country.

It was a French philosopher, Simone Weil, who asserted: “The future is made of the same stuff as the present.” It seems somewhat fitting that a Frenchman is applying this philosophy now in developing Suez Environnement’s waste management strategy in Australia.

When Waste Management Review caught up with the company’s Executive Director of Infrastructure, Emmanuel Vivant, he had recently returned from an extensive overseas business trip. Suez Environnement is bringing all its businesses – including SITA Australia – together under one brand. There’s been a great deal of preparation and liaison with headquarters in France involved for this exercise. Despite the remains of jetlag and the pressures of a busy schedule, Emmanuel is affable and accommodating in the hour-long photography shoot.

Emmanuel is obviously comfortable in a company he has worked at for over two decades. He brings to his leadership a stellar pedigree and wealth of experience in the waste management industry.

With a background in civil engineering, Emmanuel first started working for a Suez Environnement subsidiary – France Dechets – in France 21 years ago, overseeing the construction and operation of landfills. He was appointed Regional Director of SITA in Hong Kong and General Manager of Far East Landfill Technologies in 1997. Then in 2000, following an acquisition, he was appointed Operations Manager for Landfills, Swire SITA – a role that involved running two of the largest landfills in the world.

Emmanuel moved to Australia in 2001, when he was appointed Executive Director of Infrastructure for SITA Australia. After almost 15 years in the country, he retains his Parisian accent. This lends a certain sophistication to our conversation about waste.

According to its website, Suez Environnement’s strategy for its waste business in Australia is “to plan and deliver smart, reliable resource management solutions for towns and cities, business and industry”. These solutions are constantly evolving, and Emmanuel says he has noticed many changes in waste handling in Australia since his arrival.

“When I first came to Australia, resource recovery was in its infancy,” says Emmanuel. “Over the past 15 years, the focus of waste management has shifted from a landfill-only solution to an increasing and continued focus on resource recovery.”

Emmanuel says councils and commercial and industrial customers are looking to divert waste from landfill while optimising the cost of waste management. He attributes that direction down to the public’s expectation that waste will be recycled or reused.

“This has resulted in the development of new services where we can help commercial and industrial customers achieve ‘zero waste’ through material segregation at the source, through to ad-hoc processing, such as de-packaging or sorting,” says Emmanuel.

From his position, Emmanuel is seeing a new direction for how municipal and commercial organisations in Australia wish to handle waste materials.
Weil’s philosophy of the future being made of the same stuff as the present seems to chime with the aims of the “resource revolution”, a concept Emmanuel discussed at a waste management conference in May. But what does it really mean to Suez Environnement’s Executive Director, who oversees waste recovery?

“The ‘resource revolution’ means that the community will abandon a linear model of consumption from cradle to grave for a circular one, where recycling and reuse will become the norm,” says Emmanuel.

A Role to Play

He emphasises that this is where Suez Environnement has an essential role to play, to engage with all stakeholders of the circular economy to manage and transform what is waste into new resources or energy. Under his direction, the business is developing new technology and services in response to the requests and needs of its customers.

“Suez Environnement has concrete solutions at various stages of the cycle and we’re always looking for more effective ways to put waste to good use,” says Emmanuel.

This is evidenced, he states, by his company’s significant investment in resource recovery infrastructure in Australia, including a network of seven Advanced Resource Recovery Technology (ARRT) facilities and a de-packaging facility. The ARRT plants process organic waste to create compost and dry refuse materials to turn into alternative fuels.

“Customers want smarter solutions to meet their waste needs, and globally Suez Environnement is prepared to lead and invest,” adds Emmanuel.

One example of this investment came last year with the opening of PLAST’lab in Europe. This laboratory is dedicated to analysing, testing and classifying plastic materials, then developing new ranges of high-quality plastics from recycled products to meet manufacturers’ requirements.
“As a company in Europe, we hope to double the production of recycled plastics in the next five years,” Emmanuel states. “There’s then an opportunity for us to leverage our global expertise to provide the best local solutions for the Australian market.”

However, for the resource revolution to truly come to fruition, Emmanuel says product manufacturers, retailers and consumers need to work together with a shared vision.

“We need to move away from a situation where products are simply discarded at the end of their life,” he says. “Manufacturers need to consider the deconstruction of their product at design stage to facilitate their recycling at the end of life. By doing so, we can reduce cost and recycling becomes a viable alternative to landfill.”

Challenges for Recovering Waste

In this ongoing environment of throwaway goods, and the part played by fast-developing technology in generating more e-waste, Emmanuel advocates a collaborative approach between all stakeholders.

For him, the manufacturer needs to look at smart design to consider their products’ full life cycle. The consumer may need to accept the potential of paying more for goods. State and local governments need to support the development of new collection and processing services. Finally, Suez Environnement and its waste industry peers have a place in proposing and developing the recycling and recovery services and solutions.

Again, Emmanuel echoes the Weil philosophy of seeing the future in the present by citing the need for markets for recycled products. He calls for manufacturers to endorse the recyclables industry by actively using, and buying, secondary raw materials with which to make new products.

“Recycled paper, for example, has become a true commodity,” explains Emmanuel. “But we need genuine markets for all sorts of materials, whether it’s different grades of glass, plastics or wood. By that, I mean pull markets, not push, as is too often the case with recyclables.”

When speaking at an industry conference in May, Emmanuel discussed the concept of waste not being waste. His conviction plays into Suez Environnement’s strategy in its recycling and processing business, which he says it sees as manufacturing facilities.

“I believe that a product should not be judged by its origin, but by its quality and its specification,” Emmanuel emphasises. “We manufacture products to a specification required by our customers and the market. Processes and quality controls are therefore paramount, especially considering the feedstock is by definition waste, heterogeneous, and we have very little control over it.”

Suez Environnement has invested in developing and implementing systems to ensure constant quality in its products.

“In Adelaide, for example, we are producing alternative fuel, 365 days a year to a stringent specification,” says Emmanuel. “We look at a wide variety of parameters, such as calorific value, moisture and chlorine. The specification is part of the contract. We’re accountable for this and we’ve been delivering a reliable product for more than a decade.”

However, he acknowledges that the key to the development of secondary markets is successful engagement and partnerships with end users or clients.
“These are long-term contracts, with guaranteed supply and take agreements, and obligations on both parts, so it’s a real partnership where mutual commitment is required,” says Emmanuel.

On the other hand, he is aware of the impact that the reduction of domestic manufacturing has on this aspiration. This has a domino effect on waste recovery and recycling operators and service providers.

“The lack of depth, or disappearance, of the manufacturing industry is a significant challenge, as it has reduced the outlets for secondary products and recycled materials,” explains Emmanuel. “It’s difficult to propose and establish new processing solutions without the certainty of long-term customer relationships and off-take agreements.”

When considering additional challenges affecting the waste and recovery industry, Emmanuel cites as a particular frustration the lost opportunities for resource recovery due to the disparities in policy across Australia.

“The waste levy, which is a key driver for waste avoidance and resource recovery, varies significantly across the country,” says Emmanuel. “Unfortunately, this triggers behaviours, as we have seen, like waste being transported from Victoria and New South Wales to Queensland. Although progress has been made in New South Wales, the interstate transportation of waste is still a major concern, and detrimental to the establishment of resource recovery solutions.”

For Emmanuel, federal and state legislators need to work together to create more consistent policies that would help the waste recycling and recovery sector become more successful.

“There’s merit in Australian state and territory governments taking a more strategic and coordinated regulatory approach,” he says. “We’d like to see more harmonisation of waste policy, in particular uniform levies.”

Emmanuel sees an opportunity for governments to lead the procurement and use of secondary raw materials. He believes regulatory frameworks for materials derived from waste would help them to compete with and replace traditional products.

Community and Waste Recovery

In addition to policymakers and industry sharing a direction, Emmanuel believes the general public has an essential role to play in the success of waste recycling and recovery initiatives. He says the reality for waste service providers is that recycling is difficult, and it drains resources when householders fail to dispose of their waste materials and use their bins correctly.

“To put it simply, there’s no point in having separate collections for dedicated streams if members of the community don’t do the right thing,” says Emmanuel. “Contamination is a major issue for recyclers both technically and financially.”

To help waste service companies provide cost-efficient processing, he thinks the public needs better education. He believes they have become more engaged with recycling, and they expect the items they put in recycling bins to be processed and re-used. However, where the current system fails is that not everyone understands what is required in terms of individual behaviour.

“Education is critical, through TV, radio and internet campaigns,” extols Emmanuel. “We need to educate the community not only about doing the right thing with their waste, but also their role in helping to create and maintain a circular economy.”

Supporting and engaging with the community is clearly important to Suez Environnement in achieving its business objectives in Australia. Emmanuel attributes this to the company’s everyday role in providing essential services to the public: supplying water to homes, processing their waste water, and collecting, recycling and disposing of their waste.

Providing these necessary services also comes with its challenges. The company recognises that waste management facilities can have some impact on the community. As such, it implements measures to minimise any detrimental effects of the location or operations of processing and disposal facilities. Nevertheless, Emmanuel emphasises that helping the public gain a better understanding of why such facilities are required would be helpful.

“We believe that collaboration with all stakeholders is essential to the resource revolution,” he says. “We started this collaboration a long time ago with the communities around our facilities where we take their input into account.”

Suez Environnement actively consults with residents who live near its sites through its “Community Reference Groups”. These provide a forum for exchange and communication between the local residents and the company.

Emmanuel says the company also believes it is important to give back to the communities where it operates. In 2013, it launched the first national waste industry community grants program. As a result, it provided more than $96,000 to 21 community groups across the country in 2014. It expects to increase its investment in local communities to more than $120,000 in 2015.

In addition, the company has two education centres – based in New South Wales and Victoria – where schools, community groups and businesses can visit to learn more about recycling, resource recovery and sustainable environment practices. These initiatives are helping Suez Environnement build better relationships with the general public and raise awareness of what the business seeks to achieve for society.

Moving Forward

SITA Australia won the Waste Management Company of the Year category in the Frost & Sullivan Australian Excellence Awards this past December. The awards committee highlighted the company’s leadership and waste recovery solutions as important factors in that success.

For Emmanuel, it’s the business’s breadth of service and coverage that sets it apart from its peers.

“Our leadership is not necessarily in technologies, but in the complete services and solutions we can provide,” says Emmanuel. “We will continue to draw on our international experience, taking into account local factors, to develop the best solutions to serve our customers and the community in Australia.”

Leveraging this looks pivotal to achieving more business in the Australian market. Bringing SITA Australia under the single Suez Environnement banner is about more than branding. Emmanuel says the organisation’s structure is changing to become more integrated, with its water and waste divisions under the same management team.

“This enables us to provide our customers with access to a fully integrated waste and water group offering a larger panel of solutions and expertise,” says Emmanuel. “For example, both divisions have significant experience in the processing of biosolids and anaerobic digestion, but from different perspectives.”

For the future of Suez Environnement’s waste management business in Australia, Emmanuel sees producing energy from waste as a new development for its market.

“Energy from waste was perhaps a little taboo 15 years ago,” he says. “Now we can see the emergence of such projects in Western Australia and discussions in New South Wales following the release of the energy-from-waste policy.”

Emmanuel also praises councils for their significant investment in new processing technologies. He sees more opportunity in resource recovery as a business, if stakeholders and investors can come together to make that happen.

“Undisputedly, the push for resource recovery is there and the circular economy is gaining momentum,” concludes Emmanuel.

“Unfortunately this critical revolution won’t happen overnight. Resource recovery technologies are still evolving and, in Australia, we will need to invest significantly in new processing facilities to reduce our reliance on landfill.”

Send this to a friend