Aquasphère: Bringing France's Water and Biowaste SMEs Together to Build Scale
As chairman of the Aquasphère group, Régis Desroches bet on bringing together specialist French SMEs in water and biowaste — giving them collectively the reach none of them had on their own. Here’s a look at the logic behind that consolidation, a pitch that shifts depending on who’s listening, and the early signs of a deeper shift in how industry thinks about water.
A Two-Track Approach to Consolidation
Aquasphère’s thesis is simple: specialist SMEs in water and biowaste can achieve together what none of them could pull off alone. On their own, these firms were too small to win contracts with major industrial groups, and too scattered to cover the country. Yet they held real technical know-how, built up over decades in the field. “Our job was to bring them together around a shared vision,” says Régis Desroches.
Building the group meant applying two filters at once, he explains. The first was about the value chain: assembling full coverage of industrial water needs, from clean water to wastewater to methanation, turning organic waste into biomethane. The second was geographic: establishing a presence across France, with sales and technical teams able to show up locally, not just to install equipment but to stay on for follow-up, maintenance and after-sales support over the long haul.
Winning Over Industry: One Message, Several Angles
There’s no one-size-fits-all pitch for getting an industrial client to rethink how they manage water, Desroches says, it all comes down to who’s in the room. A sustainability director working toward a 30% cut in water use will respond to the environmental case: protecting the resource, shrinking the water footprint, hitting group-wide sustainability targets. A maintenance manager juggling tight budgets and a shortage of skilled technicians wants hard numbers on cost and reliability.
Aquasphère’s sales teams are trained to work both angles. But whichever door they walk through, the underlying message doesn’t change: “Wasting water isn’t sustainable anymore — not economically, not environmentally. And the solutions are already out there.”
An Industry Under Pressure
Water is going through a deep shift, driven by a string of warning signs all pointing the same way. “When I was a young engineer, and later ran a plant, water was treated as abundant and practically free,” Desroches recalls. Those days are gone: water stress now hits parts of France every summer, extreme weather is triggering major pollution events that contaminate groundwater, and PFAS – the “forever chemicals” turning up in aquifers and water networks – have become a top concern for local authorities and industry alike.
Behavior is catching up with reality. The government’s Plan Eau, targeting a 10% cut in water withdrawals by 2030, sends a strong political signal. But the real shift shows up somewhere else too: in the everyday calls being made by leaders, public and private. It’s not enough yet, given what’s at stake — but it’s real, and it’s picking up speed.
Sustainable Water Management: The Ones Leading the Way
For Desroches, sustainable water management isn’t some far-off ideal: it’s already happening in a handful of pioneering places. Mouans-Sartoux, tucked in the hills above Grasse in the Alpes-Maritimes, may be the clearest proof of concept. In a region structurally short on water, this town of under 10,000 people has committed to a joined-up, regenerative approach: careful resource management, organic farming run in-house to supply school canteens, wetland protection, public awareness campaigns. A coherent model where every decision fits a bigger picture.
What Mouans-Sartoux shows is that a place that gets its water transition right isn’t one that simply uses less out of necessity, it’s one that has rethought its entire relationship with water.