How Veolia volunteers live out Earth Day all year long

The Saimaa ringed seal is one of the rarest mammals on Earth. About 500 of them remain, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and they live in only one place — a Finnish lake system they’ve been landlocked inside of ever since the land rose after the last ice age and severed their connection to the sea. They’re freshwater seals, dark-furred, slow to reproduce and almost entirely dependent on snow.

Female seals give birth in late February and early March, in lairs they dig into snowbanks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline. The lairs shelter newborn pups from predators, disturbance and the cold of an eastern Finnish winter. As Finnish winters have warmed, those snowbanks have grown thinner and harder to find, so someone has to build them. 

On Lake Saimaa this past winter, in -25°C cold and biting wind off the ice, a group of Veolia employees volunteered to do exactly that. Working under the guidance of Metsähallitus, Finland’s parks and wildlife agency, our team joined a long-running effort to build artificial drifts by hand. The payoff is meaningful in keeping this species going: In 2025, 85% of Saimaa ringed seal pups were sheltered in human-built drifts.

This year’s Earth Day theme, Our Power, Our Planet, points to the simple idea that environmental progress is built by people doing consistent work in the places where they live. It’s the kind of progress that doesn’t always make headlines and rarely fits into a single day on the calendar. At Veolia, one expression of that idea is Veolia Cares, a program that gives every employee one paid day a year to volunteer for a cause of their choice. While Earth Day arrives every April 22, the work it stands for, the work that Veolia is so passionate about, runs on its own calendar.

From a frozen lake to a Caribbean beach
The seal nurseries are one piece of a much larger picture. Veolia Cares days have taken our employees to coastlines, forests, city neighborhoods and crisis response rooms over the past year.

In France, employees joined the Veolia Foundation and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for a mapathon — a kind of skilled volunteering where participants use satellite imagery to map roads, buildings and landmarks in regions where MSF teams operate. Better maps help humanitarian workers reach patients faster in emergencies. It’s a reminder that protecting people and protecting the places they live are often the same work.

Across the Caribbean, teams in Anguilla, Aruba, the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago hit local beaches and removed more than 200 pounds of glass, plastic and styrofoam from coastlines that anchor both marine ecosystems and local economies.

In Algeria, the team at the Hamma desalination plant partnered with local nonprofit United Hussein Dey for a “GreenUp” day of tree planting and plastic waste removal.

In Latin America, the work spanned both environmental and social grounds, with trees planted in Chile, donation drives in Mexico, and sustainable handicraft workshops in Brazil for people with disabilities. And in China, volunteers in Hangzhou, Changshu and Wuxi combined community hikes and reading initiatives with environmental cleanup, weaving public health and ecological care into the same afternoon.

The work between volunteer days
Volunteer days are one expression of Earth Day’s theme. The day-to-day business of treating water is another, and it happens in some of the same ecosystems our people show up for on their own time.

A few hundred miles southwest of Lake Saimaa, the Oslo Fjord is in critical condition. Decades of nutrient pollution from insufficiently treated wastewater have driven oxygen depletion, algal blooms and steep declines in fish populations across one of Scandinavia’s most important marine environments.

In partnership with MOVAR, the inter-municipal water company serving the Moss region, Veolia is upgrading the Fuglevik wastewater treatment plant to serve 85,000 people while dramatically reducing what reaches the fjord. The upgraded facility integrates Veolia’sHybas™ IFAS process with moving bed biofilm reactors and ZeeWeed* membrane bioreactor technology, and is designed to remove 99% of microplastics and particles and at least 70% of nitrogen from treated wastewater. A phosphorus recovery system will turn captured nutrients into organic fertilizer rather than sending them to disposal. Construction is underway, with commissioning scheduled for 2029.

It’s the same instinct that puts our people on a frozen lake in February — the recognition that healthy water sustains everything else, and that protecting it is daily work.

Seal pups don’t wait for spring. Coastlines don’t clean themselves between observances. Fjords don’t recover in a single news cycle. The power the 2026 theme calls for is the kind that shows up in February cold, on Caribbean sand, in front of a laptop helping a humanitarian team find its way, and in the slow, technical work of protecting water.