Glenn Vicevic

Glenn Vicevic did not job-hop his way to the top of the water industry, he stood still and let the industry come to him. He started as a young process engineer at ORTECH, an Ontario research outfit that no longer exists, where he got hooked on membranes for a simple reason: you engineer a single product, and it cleans water without pouring in chemicals. As he puts it, it's elegant. So in 1992 he applied to a small, fearless Canadian company called Zenon Environmental to mass-manufacture that elegance, and he has been at the same desk in Oakville, Ontario ever since.

Glenn Vicevic's desk never moved, but the sign on the building changed four times. Zenon was acquired by GE Water in 2006, sold to SUEZ in 2017, then absorbed by Veolia in 2022, which means he got to watch the membrane business grow up from the inside while telling its story, in his words, four times. He is generous about what each owner taught him, GE taught management rigor, SUEZ taught him to think about the environment more broadly, and Veolia is committed to ecological transformation, and that continuity is exactly why he is worth listening to: very few people have lived the entire commercial arc of membrane filtration, from a lab curiosity to the backbone of municipal water treatment, without ever leaving the room.

Glenn Vicevic's signature is squeezing more out of infrastructure we already paid for. His favourite tool is the MABR, the membrane aerated biofilm reactor, which is a clever twist on the old biology of wastewater: instead of blasting air up through the tank in energy-hungry bubbles, you grow the microbes on a gas-permeable membrane that feeds them oxygen by quiet diffusion. Veolia's version is called ZeeLung, and the headline he keeps coming back to is that it can add up to 50% more treatment capacity inside the same concrete tank, while cutting the aeration energy bill. We are very fortunate to have this infrastructure, he says, it is dated, but we shouldn't throw it away, and most of his work is about proving that, by turning a wastewater plant into a resource-recovery factory rather than a cost centre.

Glenn Vicevic is also refreshingly honest about how hard innovation is once you are the giant. The start-up mantra is fail fast, and he likes it, but he is quick to point out the catch: it's easy to fail fast when you're starting on something, and when you're an established player, failing fast is quite expensive. So at Veolia he runs a disciplined stage-gate process, screens ideas harder up front, and treats a missed milestone as information rather than failure, because it's not a problem not to hit them as long as you understand why. And he is clear that the real test is not the invention but getting it to a paying customer, because if you innovate something and you can't get it to market, it's really not achieving impact. It is the view of a man who has shipped technology for thirty years.

Glenn Vicevic's favourite project, though, has nothing to do with capacity curves. Back in the Zenon days, he and four colleagues took a week of their own vacation to build a drinking-water plant for the Temagami First Nation in Ontario, a community that needed one, with Zenon covering the capital and suppliers donating the pumps and blowers for free. They finished commissioning the plant on Halloween, and the local children came trick-or-treating to the water plant. That is the engineer underneath the executive: the one who treats his own Oakville office's water and sewage with the company's own membranes, off the municipal grid, because if you believe in the technology, you may as well drink it.

“GE taught management rigor. SUEZ taught us about the impact of environment in a broader way. And Veolia is committed to ecological transformation. So it's like a new beginning every time you go through this, and you get to tell your story four times.”

Glenn Vicevic is, in the end, the institutional memory of membrane filtration: a thirty-year veteran who has seen which next big things actually arrived and which fizzled, which makes his quiet bet on MABRs and resource-recovery wastewater plants worth taking seriously.