Industrial Wastewater Treatment

Industrial wastewater reuse solutions

Each industrial plant has its own process characteristics, with associated water treatment and reuse requirements. However, some treatment processes that are often useful for industrial water can be listed.

• Biological treatments: aerobic or anaerobic bacteria (thus acting in the presence or absence of oxygen) are the active “subject” of the degradation of organic matter, often found in industrial wastewater, into less harmful and more easily removable substances.
• Filtration: filtration is a physical process to remove particles in wastewater down to a few tens of mg/l of total suspended solids.
• Disinfection: this is in this case an almost final stage of industrial water treatment, killing pathogenic microorganisms.
• Reverse osmosis: reverse osmosis is a physical process for removing specific pollutants from wastewater.

Filtration of industrial water is particularly convenient for this need: this is especially so when space availability is limited. This process also produces water with very small suspended particle components, which is therefore useful for reuse in the vast majority of plants.

MITA Water Technologies' canvas filtration for water reuse

Industrial water filtration systems are often used with two goals in mind: compliance with restrictive European environmental regulations and to achieve a high quality final effluent (in terms of reduction of suspended solids, BOD and COD, phosphorus, etc.) for effective reuse of the water resource in the production cycle.

For these purposes, tertiary cloth filtration is very convenient, especially with limited space for housing equipment.

In this area, one of the most viable solutions is certainly free-fiber cloth filters, in both disc and drum variants: the water treated by depth filtration, enabled by the cloth fleece, is certainly of higher quality than that of similar tertiary filtration solutions, for an output of about 5 mg/l of suspended solids. Thus, it also becomes cost-effective to recover water that would otherwise be discharged, allowing a significant economic advantage for businesses.

In some processes, however, further finishing is required than simple cloth filtration: in these contexts, disc or drum filters using free fiber are effectively installed upstream of membrane processes, e.g., reverse osmosis. Indeed, the membranes of this technology must be safeguarded from fouling as much as possible and need to receive water with a very low content of suspended solids: it is precisely cloth filters that intervene here with their versatility in handling high loads of incoming pollutants.