Veolia: Water, energy and waste management

Veolia: Water, energy and waste management

Veolia is committed to becoming a benchmark company in the ecological transition. By 2023, with a presence on five continents and nearly 218,000 employees, the Group designs and deploys useful and concrete solutions for water, waste and energy management, contributing to a fundamental change in this situation. Through its three complementary activities, Veolia contributes to the development of resources, the protection of available resources and the renewal of resources. By 2023, Veolia will provide drinking water to 113 million inhabitants, sanitation to 103 million inhabitants, produce 42 terawatt hours of energy and recycle 63 million tons of waste. Water supply to cities Did you know that in the 18th century you could meet water carriers in Paris, responsible for the capital’s water cycle? It was not until the 19th century that new technologies made it possible to supply water to individual households. Large cities such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille or Toulouse were reviewing their water supply systems. On December 14, 1853, Napoleon III authorized the creation of the Compagnie Générale des Eaux. It was in Lyon that the first public water service concession was granted. Other French cities would follow suit, such as Nantes, Nice or Paris and its suburbs. Then, from 1880, the company crossed the French border. This was the beginning of its international expansion, first in Venice, then in Constantinople and Porto. Finally, from 1884, it extended its technology to the field of wastewater treatment in Reims. Fighting urban insanitation The nineteenth century saw the rise of the hygiene movement. In order to curb epidemics and improve the unsanitary environment in cities, hygiene gave them another challenge: managing the increasing waste. Thus, the scavengers were born, wandering the streets collecting garbage. The Soulier brothers created their company in Rouen in 1870. In the same year, François Grandjouan was commissioned by the city of Nantes to "clean the streets of sludge and garbage and turn them into fertilizer." Remember these names: we will find them a hundred years later. Making it easier for you to get around the city Still in the 19th century, public transportation continued to develop: buses gradually gave way to faster and more comfortable trams. This brought the development of mechanical traction, first steam traction, then compressed air traction and electric traction. In 1875, the French tram company began operating its first lines in Le Havre, Nancy, Marseille and Bordeaux. A few decades later, in 1912, as cars proliferated, Charles Blum created the Compagnie Générale d'Entreprises Automobiles, initially to manage a fleet of public road vehicles. In 1919, it entered the market for household waste collection in Paris. Energy savings Let's wait a few years and go to Aisne. In 1937, the Villiers-Saint-Denis hospital asked the Chauffage Service company to ensure that its facilities were operated and maintained at a guaranteed temperature. This was the first energy performance contract. Combining different expertise Back to water. In 1953, the General Water Company celebrated its centenary. It had a 10,000 km network and provided drinking water to 8 million people in France alone. Five years later, the company took on almost all NATO maintenance contracts for US military bases in France. The company then expanded its areas of expertise to offer new services, particularly those related to maintenance and energy. These were the premises for what we call today IFM (Integrated Facility Management) services. IFM services allow manufacturers to benefit from a high level of internalized services, from utility management (whether water, electricity, steam or gas) to soft services such as site cleaning or waste management.

Reading: 21 2019-03-27

BnF National Library of France

BnF National Library of France

History of the National Library of France, first the Royal Library, then the National Library and the National Library, the National Library of France (BnF), since 1994 called the National Library of France, today the National Library of the French Republic. It inherits the royal collections built up since the late Middle Ages and is one of the oldest cultural institutions in France. “The mission of the BnF is to collect, catalogue, preserve, enrich and disseminate the national documentary heritage. The BnF ensures that the collections are accessible to as many people as possible, both on-site and remotely, and develops national and international collaborations. » Libraries of Kings and Scholars In 1368, Charles V housed his collection in a specially designed room in the Louvre: about ten years later, it contained more than 900 volumes. This was the beginning of a tradition that the kings of France were keen to maintain. Francois I on 28 December 1537 On 16th, a decree was issued that introduced a new principle. He ordered printers and booksellers to deposit any printed books sold in the kingdom in their bookshops at the Château de Blois. This obligation, called legal deposit, was a fundamental step for the Royal Library. It was brought back to Paris in the second half of the 16th century and survived the Wars of Religion, but not without damage. In 1666, the library experienced a real development under the leadership of Colbert, whose ambition was to make it an instrument of glory for Louis XIV. He established it in the Vivienne Quarter and led an aggressive policy of increasing the collection, doubling the number of manuscripts and quadrupling the number of printed books. Open to the public In just a few decades, the library occupied the first position in Europe. In 1719, Abbot Bignon Appointed librarian by the king, he brought the library to an unprecedented splendor. He divided it into several sections: engravings, manuscripts, medals and engraved stones, engravings, and collections of prints, titles and genealogies. He also continued the work of his predecessors in the acquisition of documents, and was very keen to include all the important works of European scholarship. Abbot Bignon also worked to facilitate access to the library for scholars and the simply curious. At the end of the 18th century, nearly a hundred people visited the library's reading room every day. Borrowing records show that encyclopedists including Voltaire and Rousseau often visited there. Revolutionary Turmoil The French Revolution had a profound impact on the library. Legal deposit was removed in July 1790 and selectively restored three years later under the Copyright Act of July 19, 1793 (until 1810). 1860). However, the King's Library, which had become the National Library, greatly increased its funds during this period, thanks to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of confiscated or seized documents. The property of the clergy, distributed between museums and libraries and the libraries of emigrants or of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Madame Elisabeth, enriched the national collection. The library also benefited from the seizures of Napoleon's troops in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. This is evidenced, for example, by the letters of Father Le Brun, librarian of the army, who was in charge of scientific and artistic searches in the northern countries with a group of scholars: We made a great discovery in Cologne. Twenty-five boxes of books... That's what the ancient town of Ubiens offered to the Republic. Modernization efforts in the 19th century The problem of insufficient library space was made worse by the large number of documents that entered as a result of the revolutionary confiscations. The first half of the 19th century was a long period of trial and error in this regard. In 1858, a commission headed by Prosper Mérimée prepared a report on the reform of the organization of the Imperial Library. Napoleon III partially adopted his conclusions, commissioning the architect Henri Labrouste to rebuild parts of the building on site. His name is especially associated with the construction of the Print Reading Room (1868), in which the use of cast iron triumphed. This renaissance was continued by the medievalist Léopold Delisle, who was appointed General Administrator in 1874. He initiated the production of the General Catalogue of Printed Books, the first volume of which was published in 1897 and the last (for works entered before 1960) in 1981. . Throughout the second half of the century, a series of exceptional donations were added to the fund: the Duke of Rouen’s collection of antique vases and coins in 1862, the collections of Bourges (1854) and Henning (1863), and even the manuscripts of Victor Hugo. Expanding Collections and Growing Audience In the 20th century, the library continued to expand, with the number of reading rooms increasing from 6 between 1930 and 1964 to 11. In parallel, three annexes were built in Versailles in 1934, 1954 and 1971, one in Sablé in 1980 and another in Provence in 1981. However, these extensions were not enough to solve the storage problem due to the explosive growth of print production. The growing number of collections and the arrival of new media, especially audiovisual, brought increasingly acute conservation problems. The places available for readers were already insufficient. Despite the modernization and computerization efforts made by the institution in the 1980s, it was difficult to adapt to the new conditions of print production and reading needs. The birth of the National Bank of France Faced with the difficulties brought about by the growth of print production and the growth of cultural needs, the National Library had to change. In this context, scientific and technological developments opened up new perspectives for the fulfillment of its mission, both in the field of conservation and in the field of document acquisition. Advances in IT tools and telecommunications are renewing the means of collection management and their identification. Combined with the digitization of texts and images, they enrich research and reading practices and open up the possibility of remote consultation of documents. On July 14, 1988, in a traditional television interview in the Parc des Champs-Elysées, the President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, announced the "construction and development of the largest and most modern library in the world": This large library must cover all areas of knowledge, be open to everyone, use the most modern data transmission technologies, enable remote consultations and establish relations with other European libraries. The site finally chosen for its construction is on the banks of the Seine in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. In August 1989, the project designed by the architect Dominique Perrault was chosen by the President of the Republic after a project selection process by an international jury. The then Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, announced that all the printed works of the National Library, that is, ten million books, would be transferred there. On December 20, 1996, the Research Library at the François Mitterrand site was opened, and on October 8, 1998, the opening of the Research Library marked the completion of this major project.

Tag: library

Reading: 19 2019-03-27

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