Industrial Wastewater Treatment Systems Can Become Energy-Efficient

Many industrial waste treatment and pumping systems have been installed to meet design conditions responsive to production projections that were either never achieved or have dramatically reduced. We have interfaced with these conditions at a number of industrial facilities.In today's business climate there is an ever changing production schedule at many locations resulting in vast changes in wastewater flows and strengths creating challenges for the personnel at the treatment facilities. The primary challenge is for them to treat the waste to meet effluent limits with continually changing influent onditions but at the same time do it as energy efficiently as possible.The presentation and paper will provide examples where this occurred and what was modified to meet the challenges of meeting effluent limits and becoming and maintaining energy efficiency. Examples of the challenges: a municipality loses it largest industry but does not modify its WWTF operations resulting in a large waste of energy, an industry decision is to move the production of a product to other location resulting in reducing its waste load by nearly 80 percent, an industry that was selling a waste product now is faced with having to treat the waste and dispose of it increasing the waste load to their treatment facility by over 100 percent.