Katia Wasiak

Katia Wasiak is one of those people who proves you do not have to leave a big company to keep inventing inside it. She is, as of 2026, the Group Technical and Performance Director for SUEZ's global Water Division, and she got there by spending three decades doing the unglamorous, persistent work of dragging new water-treatment ideas from a drawing to a working full-scale reference. When she came on (don’t) Waste Water in 2020 she summed up the whole job in one line that tells you who she is: to stay in wastewater, she said, you have to be full of passion, because the work smells bad and comes with a lot of disadvantages, so you only remain if you love it.

Katia Wasiak did not parachute into water management from the top. She trained first as an industrial chemical engineer in Belgium, then earned a PhD in water treatment and engineering at INSA Toulouse in France, and started her career in the early nineties inside a small, creative SUEZ subsidiary in Alsace called France Assainissement, supporting the people who actually operate municipal and industrial wastewater plants. That ground-level start matters to how she thinks, because she later ran the technical side of a chunk of eastern France, by her own account around 80 wastewater plants and 150 drinking-water plants and more than 5,000 kilometres of pipe, which she called a real adventure park to test new ideas in.

Katia Wasiak is best known in the industry for the decade she spent as Chief Technology Officer of Purification and Disinfection at SUEZ Water Technologies and Solutions, where she owned the research and development behind the company's UV and ozone products. UV (ultraviolet light) and ozone (an unstable, highly reactive form of oxygen) are the two main ways you disinfect water without dumping chemicals like chlorine into it, and her teams, spread across Zurich, Montreal and New Jersey, built the equipment that does it. She also chaired and ran Degremont Technologies, the roughly 35-person Swiss company that carries the Ozonia ozone-generator brand, so she was living the exact tension she likes to talk about: the heft of a global group on one side, the speed of a small one on the other.

Katia Wasiak's most quotable conviction is that innovation only works when you combine the two. A big company like SUEZ, she argues, brings the investment capacity to industrialise a solution and multiply references, while a startup brings the agility to get things done quickly. Her favourite proof of that is a project from her Alsace years, where instead of letting the biogas from a wastewater plant escape into the air, the team turned it into biomethane and injected it straight into Strasbourg's local gas network, one of the first times in France that had been done at scale. She calls that cross-sector innovation, looking at what the neighbours are doing, and it is the through-line of everything she builds.

Katia Wasiak is unusually honest about how hard the first stretch of any real innovation is, because when an idea is genuinely new, she says, people simply do not believe in it, and you have to bridge that gap on your own perseverance and energy before any larger group will put money on the table. She does not even use the word failure for the attempts that do not land. She calls them return of experience, the adjustments and improvements that eventually become the breakthrough, which is about the most useful thing a thirty-year veteran can hand a younger engineer.

“The power of a big company as SUEZ is to have huge investment capacity, to multiply the references, and to industrialize the solutions. Sometimes I feel as a freighter, and I would like to be more as a startup, as a speedboat. But we need both.”

Katia Wasiak is, in short, the rare big-company technologist who has kept the instincts of a founder, which is most of why she has spent three decades shipping water ideas other people thought were too early.