The Veolia Environnement Foundation and its Veoliaforce network of employee volunteers is taking action with its operational partners to bring aid to the disaster victims following the devastating typhoon in the Philippines.
Volunteers will be leaving today with the NGO Solidarités International to go to the Tacloban area, where they will assemble two water treatment units and train operators in how to use them. The Aquaforce 500 units are based on ultrafiltration technology and can supply 15 liters of potable water per person per day for up to 2,000 people.
The Aquaforce 500 weighs just 250 kg and, at 2.5 cubic meters, is fairly small. These features, along with its ergonomics, robustness, packaging and ease of use, make it easily transportable by plane or pickup truck, simple to deploy on the ground and well suited to extreme conditions.
Other organizations have called on the Foundation for help in surveying the damage to water production plants and distribution networks and to send teams to assess needs and help decide the scale of the response required.
The Foundation is in contact with the NGO Première Urgence, the French Red Cross, and the NGO Doctors of the World, with which it has been working for over a year on improving the sanitary conditions of people who recycle waste electrical and electronic equipment at waste dumps in Manila.
The Veolia Environnement Foundation
The Veolia Environnement Foundation supports community-oriented projects contributing to sustainable development in France and other countries in three main areas: outreach, workforce development and environmental conservation. The originality of its approach is that each project is supported by a sponsor who is a Veolia employee. The Foundation also encourages volunteering of skills, contributing the know-how of the Veolia Environnement employees to its partners, associations and institutions. Since its creation in 2004, the Veolia Environnement Foundation supported close to 1000 projects in France and internationally, and participated in 150 expertise missions.
> The Veolia Environnement Foundation website
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