Environmental regulations for wastewater are often only set when technology becomes available. Can forward-thinking companies work with new technology providers and regulators to set new standards? Our experience is that they can and this then puts them in a competitively advantageous position.
Legacy water treatment processes were not designed to remove recalcitrant organics down to parts per trillion levels – let alone parts per billion. Some activated carbon processes can approach these levels but all GAC systems require regular replenishment of media with the attendant issues involved in taking a treatment process offline whilst this is taking place.
Additionally, GAC is less than environmentally friendly, both from an initialisation point of view as well as on an ongoing basis. For more information see this article about the disadvantages of activated carbon to treat wastewater.
In Europe and many other industrialised countries, water discharge regulations were drawn up over ten years ago; therefore, they are now seriously lagging behind the available science.
Plus when considering wastewater plants, many have been established for a considerable period of time and may only have legacy filtration and biological treatments available – neither of which can remove any recalcitrant organic compounds, the prime motivation for the invention of Arvia’s advanced systems in the first place.
Some forward-thinking companies are aware of this and additionally are sensitive to both public opinion and investor sentiment. So they are working towards what they believe will be enshrined in future water discharge regulations – and what their investors and the public want to see happening. This is especially relevant in industries that recognise the CSR and cost implications of using a vast amount of water in their production processes – like pharma, agrochemicals, semiconductors, and petrochem.
Moreover, industrial and domestic demand as well as climate change is leading to a severe scarcity of water in some parts of the world. Our ‘tuned’ water treatment systems enable companies to re-use precious water many times over – potentially eventually leading to ZLD – zero liquid discharge.
At Arvia, we can see a time not far in the future where public opinion (and even the views of investors) rather than governments may drive many more environmental regulations. Will your company be prepared?
Don’t think that this is some dystopian point of view put forward by a weirdo in a tree-house (!) either. At Arvia we have case studies showing this is happening already. Like:
We’re working with a North American Pharma company that’s getting pressure from major clients to improve their wastewater treatment even though it’s currently well within current discharge limits.
We can go down a lot further than the local regulations and the advantage of an Arvia Rosalox system is, unlike oxidation systems, achieving really low concentrations doesn’t use any more power. In fact, it often uses less.
We’ve worked with an organisation primarily supplying the UK’s National Health Service that needed to show to this massive client that all their supplies are eco-friendly – in order to remain on the NHS’s preferred supplier list.
The advantage of using an Arvia system here is that it does not need hazardous chemical dosing and does not produce toxic sludge. So the impact on the environment is minimal.
We are currently working with a South American aquaculture company that wants to reduce pesticide release into seawater. Locally there are no regulations for this, so they want to show the regulators what’s possible. They hope that when the inevitable regulations are introduced, they’ll be well ahead of the curve as will have had an input into drawing them up.
A massive advantage of working with Arvia in aquaculture is that our Nyex reactors don’t generate any toxic sludge and require minimal media replenishment – a major consideration when working on barges or tenders at sea.
Arvia’s water treatment systems are based around our revolutionary Nyex™ media.
In a Nyex Rosalox™ system, pollutants are adsorbed onto the Nyex™. An electrical charge creates OH radicals which oxidise the pollutants, turning them into water and gas. At the same time, the charge actually regenerates the Nyex™ meaning unlike GAC filtration, no replenishment of media is required.
The systems offer numerous advantages to many industries where water is an intrinsic part of the production process and will need to be discharged in a suitable state to meet or better local obligations.
Essentially it uses the most effective parts of two existing processes: adsorption and oxidation … but with few of the disadvantages.
No chemical dosing is required, meaning no COSHH issues with potentially dangerous chemicals; additionally, Arvia’s systems contain no moving parts meaning less maintenance and downtime. Finally the systems don’t create a toxic sludge and only require a 1 – 3 % top up of media every year.
For more info on our next-generation water treatment systems, please take a look at our product pages.
At Arvia we’ve shown here that we are already seeing forward-looking companies taking the initiative when it comes to working with regulators to set new standards.
We are also helping companies to ‘go it alone’ and work to higher specifications – perhaps because it suits them to take the ‘moral high ground’. Perhaps they can also see the impending changes for stricter regulations and want to be prepared.
Whatever motivation, the push-back by companies against the laissez faire short-termism from governments (whether in the UK, Europe or elsewhere) when it comes to environmental legislation, is a pleasing uptick.
For an in-depth conversation about how we could help your company in terms of water treatment why not set up a meeting or conference call?
We are the water experts and understand that every manufacturing system is different and therefore every solution we propose will be unique to your organisations’ requirements. It could be that we’ve already had experience in an industry similar to yours. We’ll be more than happy to work with you to specify the most effective treatment system for the issues you have.
So please call or email today for an initial conversation with a water treatment expert.