Fighting climate change

This mini-series # SUEZ4CLIMATE presents 4 concrete answers in the fight against climate change.

Part 1 takes you to La Farfana, a wastewater treatment plant in Santiago de Chile, which has become the world's leading biofactory.

Part 2 takes you to QCP Quality Circular Polymers. Located in the Netherlands, a factory that gives a second life to plastic.

SUEZ has signed up to achieve the 2-degree target. The Group is committed to limiting the carbon footprint of its activities in all the countries where it operates. Fitting out all storage sites with biogas recovery systems, a reinforced clean vehicles policy and the improvement of the energy performance of the activities will all help to achieve these targets.

 

SUEZ is also committed to helping its customers in industry and local government to avoid GHG emissions thanks to dedicated circular economy solutions (waste-to-material and waste-to-energy) and by doubling the recovery of plastics, which is a major economic and environmental challenge.

• Reduce direct and indirect GHG emissions by 10% by 2021, and 30% by 2030
• Help our customers to avoid more than 60 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions
• Double the volume of recycled plastic
• Increase the production of renewable energy by more than 10%

By 2035, 40% of the world's population will live in water-stressed regions. This is one of the main consequences of climate change. Without water, there can be no development, food, agriculture or health. SUEZ is committed to saving water through the improved control of leaks and consumption, and to maximizing the offer by increasing the available volumes of alternative water (re-use of wastewater, desalination).

 

SUEZ provides industry with solutions to limit its water footprint and is working to raise awareness of the consequences of climate change on water through the Business Alliance for Water and the Climate. Preventing is as importing as adapting. SUEZ develops predictive tools to prevent the risk of flooding for local authorities, irrespective of their size.

• Systematically offer to our customer plans of resilience to the effects of climate change
• Promote the different usages of water by multiplying by 3 our alternative water production capacity by 2030
• Save the equivalent of the water consumption of a city of more than 2 million inhabitants

Every one of SUEZ’s employees is working for the Resource Revolution. Shifting the Group’s activities towards the circular economy is the most effective means of achieving this end.

 

The circular economy disconnects growth from the consumption of natural resources while also reducing GHG emissions. The Group is renewing its goal to increase the proportion of waste turned into secondary raw materials and is making this goal worldwide in scope.

• Increase the production of secondary raw materials by 20%
• Achieve a ratio of 2 tonnes of waste for reuse, for every tonne of waste that is disposed of

The fight against climate change and the large-scale deployment of the circular economy both demand the creation of a new economic model structured to take external environmental and social impacts into consideration.

 

SUEZ is working to develop this model by adopting an internal carbon price, by systematically proposing a remuneration of operators indexed to global performance, by participating in efforts to develop material circularity indicators that will make the measurement of the impacts of the new model more robust.

• Introduce a directive carbon price in 60% of the annual expenditure committed to new projects
• Introduce a harmonised global circularity indicator for goods and services
• Systematically offer pay packages partially index-linked to our global performance
• Raise employee awareness and promote training in emerging models (carbon accounting, new business models, etc.)