SaltMaker MVR & MSF Evaporative Crystallizers
Achieve true ZLD with two forced circulation evaporative crystallizer options: SaltMaker MVR and SaltMaker MSF.
Industrial Wastewater Treatment
Treating complex, industrial wastewaters for discharge, reuse, and freshwater recovery
Heavy industries, manufacturing, and natural resources industries often use large volumes of water and generate wastewaters requiring treatment. Saltworks designs, builds, and operates industrial wastewater treatment plants with modern membrane, chemical, and thermal technologies that economically and reliably treat tough industrial wastewaters.
Industrial Wastewater Management
The first step in managing your industrial wastewater is to define your goals. Do you need to meet discharge requirements, minimize off-site disposal costs, reduce freshwater withdrawal, or achieve reuse targets? Do you need to target problematic contaminants such as metals and ions, achieve minimal or zero liquid discharge, or recover valuable by-products from your wastewater?
Next, you need to know what’s in your water, figure out what constituents you need to treat, and set project targets. After that comes understanding your options—both the technologies and the economics. Industrial wastewaters can be complex, with variable compositions that make treatment more challenging. Saltworks can help with the entire process—from project discovery and options analysis, to pilot scale testing and all the way to full-scale plant delivery.
What’s in Your Wastewater?
Some of the industrial wastewater components we frequently encounter and address include:
- Acids, bases, and pH
- Ammonia
- Biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD)
- Chlorides and fluorides
- Cyanide and heavy metals
- Oils, fats, and grease
- Organic compounds
- PFAS (Perfluoroalkyl)
- Scaling ions e.g. calcium, silica
- Sulfates
- Total suspended solids (TSS) and total dissolved solids (TDS)
At the early stages of a project, it is important to know the concentrations of components like these in your industrial wastewater, how they vary, and the overall wastewater flow rate.
Adapting Solutions for Your Project’s Goals
Delivering the right wastewater treatment process is not just about treating the waste stream and its components. Often the most reliable and economic solution will combine treatment, recycling, and disposal. Other project concerns may include:
- Air emissions and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
- Automation
- Brine management
- Cooling tower scaling
- Discharge limits and regulatory compliance
- Disposal and wastewater transportation costs
- Energy costs
- Evaporation pond balance
- Freshwater recovery (e.g. reverse osmosis recovery)
- GHG emission reductions
- Harvesting valuable by-products such as metals
- Operations & maintenance
- Reducing freshwater withdrawal
- Uptime & reliability
Wastewater Reuse Solutions
When fresh water is scarce or costly, treating and re-using wastewater can provide a cost-effective water supply while improving sustainability outcomes, and therefore ESG metrics.
Harvesting valuable reagents, metals, nutrients, and more from spent wastewater can also add a lot of value for some industries.
Wastewater reuse considerations start with chemistry, permits, and an applicable technology review. It may be that only one or two constituents of concern prevent re-use and that by targeting their removal, massive volumes of water can be recycled. In other cases, you may require extremely clean fresh water with minimized brine residual by-products.
Industrial Wastewater Treatment Options
Saltworks’ water experts help with water chemistry, project details, and overall objectives. We develop comprehensive options analyses that consider available technologies, treatment and disposal economics, and regulatory requirements.
Our proprietary solutions include advanced chemical, thermal, and membrane systems that work alongside novel sensor technologies and intelligent controls. We offer an even wider range of technologies through our partners, enabling us to provide a wastewater treatment solution optimized for your specific project.
We scale up in whatever way suits you best, starting with desktop studies and mobile pilot systems that quickly and cost-effectively prove performance, either at the project site or our facility. Our full-scale plants are designed, engineered, and manufactured at our own facility, ensuring responsiveness, cost-optimization, and quality assurance from project start to testing, and through to delivery and commissioning. We can also perform in-place upgrades to modernize, automate, or expand your existing wastewater treatment facilities. To learn more about how we treat the toughest waters, see our wastewater treatment articles.
To investigate your project’s treatment options, contact our expert industrial wastewater team.
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