Buzz phrases abound in business. Their vacuity often says more about those who use them rather than throwing light on any tangible action or process.
So when Estelle Brachlianoff, the boss of the UK’s largest waste and recycling business, starts to wax lyrical about the concept of the so-called circular economy, it’s easy to feel a sense of dread. The phrase is bandied about frequently these days to describe any form of materials reuse that leads to the creation of a different marketable product. It’s one of those fluffy concepts that many companies talk about, but far fewer can actually pinpoint in action.
Veolia is different, though. Brachlianoff can rattle through examples of the circular economy in action, delivering firm results to the company’s bottom line. “We are taking black bin bags full of waste and using them to deliver heat,” she says. “We are sweeping roads and mining precious metals from the fine dust that is generated. We are making plastics from human sludge.
“Now, 20% of Veolia’s turnover is accounted for by the circular economy, and that represents hundreds of millions of pounds. It’s no longer just a strategy or a vision – it’s right there in the financial figures and in the reality of the company.”
Veolia is a big company. It has a turnover of £2 billion and employs 14,000 people, offering waste and recycling services, waste-water treatment and localised energy provision. Brachlianoff, a 42-year-old French engineer who previously managed major infrastructure projects in the Greater Paris region, joined the company in 2012.
Although it was highly profitable, she could see that a previously guaranteed pipeline of Public Finance Initiative work was starting to dry up, and that landfill taxes were going only one way: upwards. She realised that the business model needed to be adapted to the new environment, and it needed doing fast.
“We had to think where the next step of growth was coming from,” she says. “It was about shifting the mindset at a comfortable, successful company to move forward and putting a seed in the ground to make forests in five years’ time.”
It was, in part, a bumpy journey. “I’m French, female and relatively young, and I was brought in to lead the company,” she says. “Why appoint someone like me if you just want to do what you have done for the past 30 years? I had a vision of where we wanted to go with the circular economy. And I genuinely believed in it.”
Others on the executive committee weren’t so convinced. “It took a few conversations, but they came onboard,” she says, with a smile. “Yes, I made some changes to the executive committee to make sure they were aligned with it, because probably it was all a bit conservative. We needed more innovative people, more people from outside the industry, a more diverse profile, so that we could start to think more out of the box.
“We changed quite a lot of the team to get this mixture right. Then we cascaded it down to the layers below through internal roadshows, enabling staff to understand what the circular economy is. Many didn’t have a clue, as it was a bit conceptual. Now I’m proud to say that our people know what we mean and how we are doing it.”
The circular economy, at Veolia, is essentially the creation of green calories, green materials and green compost from what would have previously been considered waste, and in most cases disposed of through landfill. Brachlianoff views it as mining – not in the traditional sense, but in the extraction of marketable products from the waste and waste-water flows that Veolia takes from its customers.
The transition of such materials has required a lot of investment – Veolia spends on average £250 million a year on new recycling and waste-to-energy plants and other facilities. “It’s all about creating new loops of production, and we are creating more each month,” she says.
So how about some firm examples of this modish new buzz phrase? The company recently entered the solid recoverable fuel market by manufacturing more than 6,000 tonnes of ‘biscuits’ at its waste recycling facilities in Southwark, south London, and Basildon, Essex. The biscuits, which contain calories that can be used as a fossil-fuel substitute, are the non-recyclable part of waste from commercial and industrial customers that would otherwise be sent to landfill.
The waste is first shredded several times and any metals extracted for recycling. A combination of mechanical equipment is used in the process, including rotary drum screens, magnets, eddy-current separators and air classifiers, as well as optical sorters for the recovery of plastics. The material is finally shredded again to a tight specification and the remaining solid recoverable fuel is sent for energy recovery to a third party. The fuel can be in many forms and is produced to meet the input specifications of either cement kilns or power stations.
Pro-Grow, meanwhile, is a range of organic products that are manufactured from householders’ green waste, collected on the doorstep and converted into peat-free compost for use in gardens. This process, says Veolia, offers an ideal alternative to chemical fertilisation of the soil, which entails the mining of potassium and phosphorus for agriculture and landscaping uses.
The company has also produced tens of thousands of litres of ‘soup’ from food and beverage waste which can be transformed into a renewable liquid fuel for use in energy provision and anaerobic digestion facilities. It has invested in a facility at Tinsley in South Yorkshire to process this waste.
Meanwhile, residents in Southwark are benefiting from a heat-from-waste plant established by Veolia. Non-recyclable household waste – the kind usually thrown away in black bin bags – is incinerated and converted into electricity and hot water, providing a long-term, sustainable alternative to gas. The combined-heat-and-power scheme prevents 8,000 tonnes a year of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere by recovering useful energy from waste that would otherwise have been sent to landfill. It also results in much lower emissions of nitrous oxide.
Brachlianoff is particularly proud of this initiative. “It means that we can say to the inhabitants of Southwark: ‘your black bag is heating your home’,” she says. “It makes sense in terms of sustainability, but it can also secure lower bills.”
Valuable resource: Non-recyclable was is incinerated to produce electricity
Perhaps the most unlikely example of the circular economy is the extraction of rare metals such as platinum, palladium and rhodium from street sweepings and gully waste. These metals are commonly used in catalytic converters, and very small amounts can be emitted from car exhausts, which then settle on street surfaces. By collecting and ‘mining’ this dust, Veolia says that it can reclaim the metals, and it has set up a facility to do so in Rugby, Warwickshire.
The technology consists of a two-step treatment. The dry phase acts like a gigantic magnetic sieve, using screens and magnetic separators to sort oversize and ferrous material such as twigs, stones and cans which are passed over a screen with small holes in it. The second step uses a wet washing process that treats and sorts sand, silt and aggregates.
Cans and plastics go for recycling, twigs and leaves to biodegradation, and stones and glass to aggregates, leaving a sludge which is centrifuged to separate the water from the solids. The final separation of solids leaves a dust that offers the opportunity for the recovery of precious metals, says the firm.
Such a breadth of initiatives requires innovation, and Brachlianoff has thrown down the gauntlet to Veolia’s staff, establishing regular Dragons’ Den-type competitions, where employees pitch ideas for funding. “We want to encourage innovation rather than people being constricted by traditional views,” she says. “It has been a successful initiative that has welcomed people with ideas and encouraged them to take them forward.”
One ‘innovation den’ proposal led to the setting up of a recycling operation at Veolia’s Norwood site to process used cleaning products that would have gone to landfill, enabling them to be reused within the company to wash trucks. “We get a lot of good ideas. I want people to dare more,” she says.
All these initiatives bolster Veolia’s sustainability credentials, which helps with marketing and public relations. But they won’t survive in the long term unless they also provide the company with profitable returns. As the boss of Veolia in UK and Ireland for the merged water, waste and energy operations, Brachlianoff knows that ultimately she will be judged by the financial performance of the business. That doesn’t leave much room for sentimentality.
But, for her, the circular economy isn’t about image. It’s about believing in a new business model that will provide a stable foundation for the long term. “The circular economy is already worth several hundred million pounds, and I want to double its size inside Veolia over the next five years,” she says.
On a mission to encourage diversity and foster innovation
Estelle Brachlianoff has stacks of experience. As a qualified engineer, she enjoyed an accelerated career in her homeland of France, being in charge of waste management in the Greater Paris area, and overseeing large infrastructure projects. Her skills and experience made her perfectly suited to the role of senior executive vice-president of Veolia UK and Ireland.
But, despite having a stellar CV, Brachlianoff admits that she wasn’t perhaps an obvious choice for such a high-profile role in what is a male-dominated industry. Once in the role, she recognised that the waste and recycling sector had been conservative in its recruitment policies, and was therefore keen to encourage greater organisational diversity.
“Innovation comes with diversity, and by that I mean diversity of profile, mindset and experience,” she says. “We have made great progress in this respect. In terms of the executive committee, the faces have changed. They are younger now. There
are more females, and not everyone is British. It’s impacted us as a team. We are more productive.”
Brachlianoff says she has been shocked by how hard it is to recruit the number of engineers that Veolia requires for the many investment programmes it is initiating. “It’s crazy to recruit any engineer – it’s a major problem,” she says. “Finding a good engineer who actually wants to set about building plants is difficult.”
She recognises that industry has a role to play when it comes to training more young engineers. Veolia has 800 apprentices on its books, and the number is likely to keep rising. She admits that selling an organisation that has its name plastered over dustcarts can be difficult, but says the image of the company is changing. “The more we are in the circular economy, and the more people see us helping to resource the world, the more it changes.
“We can say to young engineers: ‘not only will you have a good career, but you will be helping to save the planet’. They are sensitive to a job that makes sense in that way. We are better placed than others, but it is hard.”
There have been real successes. Veolia has three times as many female applicants for job vacancies as it did three years ago. But more needs to be done. “Sometimes we end up recruiting from abroad because we have no other choice,” says Brachlianoff.
“I hope it will change, but it won’t change quickly enough.”