Veolia accelerates its growth & investments with GreenUp in Australia

In its first year of Veolia’s strategic GreenUp program, Australia delivered 7.7% organic growth in revenue supplying what Australians want ― more recycling, more recovery, de-pollution and clean water.

Outstripping GDP growth and CPI, these new services answer the call from industry, cities and citizens to make the Ecological Transformation happen quicker.

Australia, with the rest of the world, is in the midst of an ideological change: shifting away from the linear consumption model we're used to, and towards a more sustainable, circular economy that helps to preserve our environment. As the country accelerates its shift toward renewable energy and sustainable industries, fostering a strong local green economy has become a national priority. According to a study carried out last January, 72% of Australians want the transition to renewable energy to happen faster. It's time to move forward towards ecological transformation in action.

A year after Veolia Australia was named a priority zone for Veolia Group’s Green Up strategic plan, the business finished 2024 with an expanded energy portfolio, new resource recovery and water treatment operations, and delivered an impressive 7.7% increase in revenue, and 10.5% increase in profitability. This is just the start of an investment trajectory planned until the end of 2027.

Veolia’s global GreenUp strategic program, launched in 2024, aims to accelerate solutions that depollute, decarbonise and regenerate the world's resources. Australia was identified as one of three key regions (alongside North America and The Middle East) for accelerated growth, with a focus on reinforcing existing ‘strongholds’ and accelerating new business ‘boosters’ of water technology, and energy and hazardous waste, to propel the company into these rapidly growing business sectors.

Boosters that provide thrust: combining our expertise in water, waste and energy

Veolia Australia has launched Green Up into action with a combination of strategic acquisitions and explosive growth in existing markets. This has seen the company boost its energy presence, expand its liquid and hazardous wastes treatment businesses, and renew key water contracts that are critical to national supply. The key booster activities of 2024 include:

• Acquisition of Energy In a Box, making Veolia Australia an energy retailer. We now supply energy to 185 sites, and have a portfolio of generation assets from biogas, solar and waste, opening the door to power purchase agreements with an extensive industrial customer base hungry for renewable energy.
• Upgrade and opening of EarthPower, the largest merchant anaerobic digestion facility in the country, which will process 50,000 tonnes of commercial food waste in phase 1, generating 2MW of green energy, and producing bioprills, an organic fertiliser.
• Acquisition of Brandster, a liquid waste treatment technology in south-west Sydney that has high growth potential and will internalise our collected volumes.
• The local deployment of ‘Beyond PFAS’, an offer comprising Veolia Australia’s unique set of capabilities in treating PFAS contaminated solids and liquids in thermal, chemical and physical treatment facilities. The combined revenue for decontaminating Australia’s land was almost $100M.
• Investment and delivery of an expansion at EarthSure, a joint venture with longstanding partner and ally Ventia, for a new soil washing plant in Victoria. This high tech facility will treat 160,000 tonnes of contaminated soils from the state which equates to 25-30% of Victoria’s contaminated soils.
• Signing a 20 year contract renewal at the Sydney Desalination Plant, which provides 18% of Sydney’s fresh clean drinking water.
• Ecologically transforming the carbon capture of our landfill operations by installing new gas capture infrastructure, leachate management processes and methane conversion to electricity. These decarbonisation solutions help to significantly depollute the environment.
• Installing solar panels to the roof of 24 of our operational sites, generating a combined renewable capacity of 4MW.

Strongholds that are robust

Veolia Australia has continued to deliver on its strongholds in municipal water and waste collections, and its industrial services, while renewing key contracts in 2024 and expanding its municipal resource recovery efforts, including:

• Renewing the Spring Farm Resource Recovery Park contract, worth $180M, which includes kerbside collections, a MRF and transfer station and the capacity to process 280,000 tonnes of recovered resources every year over the life of the 5 year contract.
• Opening the new Spreyton Materials Recovery Facility in Tasmania, worth $64M. This facility is the most advanced in the state and will process more than 20,000 tonnes of recyclable waste every year.
• Winning the tender to design, develop and operate the Hume ACT Materials Recovery Facility. This 20-year contract, worth more than $850-million,  will recover more than 1.3M  tonnes of recyclables, using state-of-the-art sorting technology to boost recycling rates.
• Renewing our decade-long partnership with the Department of Defence, which will see Veolia deliver on targets across the Defence estate to divert 80% of waste from landfill by 2030.
• A new contract with SA Water providing O&M services to 18 remote aboriginal communities across the APY Lands and other remote parts of the state, realising our ambition of providing access to clean drinking water and sanitation services for all Australians, and fulfilling Veolia's purpose of ecological transformation.
• We are now in our second year of a new $280 million contract to operate several of the City of Gold Coast’s recycling, resource recovery and waste management facilities, the largest public sector partnership in Australia. 

CEO and Managing Director for Veolia Australia Richard Kirkman said the results coming out of  Veolia Australia showed the strength of the Green Up strategy and how our global knowhow and experience can be localised to help our customers get the best outcomes, supporting governments and key industries at the same time. 

“Australia’s developing policy environment makes it an Eldorado for private sector investment, especially to support vital industries such as mining and agriculture, who are transforming their resource recovery efforts. The country’s unique climate presents plentiful wind and sun, along with its access to large bodies of water, allowing us to bring a vast array of high tech and dynamic global solutions to these shores, to create an immediate impact,” he said.

“The financial growth we have experienced in this first year shows us that ecological transformation in Australia is gathering momentum, and with Veolia’s global experience at our fingertips, we are uniquely positioned to deliver the next generation of circular economy and renewable energy solutions.”

2025 and beyond

Just two months into the second year of Green Up 2025, Veolia Australia is already on track to deliver even more promising results as it continues to boost its energy and water presence in Q1. Most notably this will include the official launch of Veolia Australia's Energy retail offer, as well as the pending announcement of a major renewable energy project capable of supplying up to 200MW of green power to our customers. This single project, alone, will produce enough energy to power about 200,000 average households.  “The pipeline of growth we have in store for 2025 as we continue our Green Up campaign is expected to continue our revenue growth and build on our company’s global goal to ecologically transform industry in Australia and around the world, so that our customers get the very best bang for their buck” said Mr Kirkman.