Veolia’s Sustainable Packaging Academy (SPA) gives our customers in manufacturing more advice, insight and tools to make their packaging and materials more circular – making it easier for them to be collected, recycled and returned to industry for re-use. SPA members get access to the latest reports and design guides to keep ahead of legislative changes and make the circular economy happen.

We have become the first company to join the On-Pack Recycling Label (OPRL) organisation under the recently introduced waste management company membership grade. We’ve spent the past decade working to advance the collection and recycling of materials, helping manufacturers to design packaging that can more easily be recycled.

This is supported by new infrastructure we have developed and commissioned to capture and recycle even more materials, including:

• 300 million plastic milk bottles
• 100 million coffee cups
• Transforming 60,000 tonnes of glass bottles and jars into home insulation

We carried out 442 million collections across our local-authority contracts during the year, serving 3.1 million residential properties. Two million tonnes of waste was collected, including general, dry mixed recycling, food and green waste. Our best performing contract for recycling was St Albans, with an impressive 63% recycling rate.

We also ran a charity Christmas Tree Recycling Initiative in the town, collecting 1,350 trees from homes and raising more than £21,000 for the Hospice of St. Francis.

We worked with Imperial College to evaluate plastic’s real environmental impact over its complete lifetime – from manufacturing and logistics to usage and disposal – when it comes to its carbon footprint. Published in a report, the analysis concluded that plastic can provide the lowest carbon emissions of available materials provided it is recycled properly.

We also ran a successful webinar to give our customers the information they need to prepare for the UK’s Plastic Packaging Tax.

We continue to help customers increase their use of clean energy and move towards low carbon operations.

We designed and installed new energy services for the UK’s largest single-site life science campus at Alderley Park in Cheshire. The low-carbon system will provide 45GWh of electricity and 200GWh of heat to support pioneering bioscience and technology companies. The service will also help to deliver energy security and counter climate change by saving around 8,400 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent a year.

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust will save £1 million a year and cut 49,620 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent thanks to signing a new 20-year Energy Performance Contract with Veolia. The Trust will replace seven 40-year old boilers at the 500-bed hospital.

A new ten-year contract to deliver household waste collections and street cleansing services in the Chiltern, Wycombe and South Bucks areas of Buckinghamshire will see a new fleet of collection vehicles introduced to reduce emissions. New state-of-the art in-cab technology will allow residents to report problems and get updates in real-time.

Recycling and waste collections will continue in Folkestone & Hythe and Dover, as well as the introduction of new initiatives to help both councils achieve their carbon net-zero goals by 2030. These include a new green fleet of vehicles and electric sweepers.

We continue to work with our suppliers to improve their sustainability and reduce our overall impact on people and the planet. As we take on new suppliers, we ensure they are committed to improving energy performance and corporate responsibility, to ensure they meet the standards set out in our Sustainable Procurement Policy, particularly in adhering to standards to prevent modern slavery.

We have introduced a new way to score new vendors based on their sustainability credentials.

The average score among 152 suppliers recorded so far is 81% for the corporate responsibility section.

Our suppliers with a turnover greater than £100 million score 100% compliance.

We work with Ecovadis, a third-party sustainability assessment platform that also scores suppliers on how well they have integrated sustainability principles into their business. It is built on international sustainability standards, including the Global Reporting Initiative, the United Nations Global Compact and ISO 26000.

In 2020, 40 of our suppliers participated.

We are taking a stand against modern slavery, which affects millions of people worldwide. Our new Anti-Slavery Strategy seeks to reduce the risk of modern slavery in our operations and supply chains. We will do this by helping our people and suppliers become more aware of the issue and identifying where it might occur. We will report our progress in our annual Modern Slavery Statement, published on our website.

We work with our partners to keep our vehicles moving across the UK. Using remanufactured products such as solid tyres, filled pneumatic tyres and re-treaded pneumatic tyres, we saved 194,309kg of CO₂ equivalent and more than 7,355 litres of oil in 2020.