Novel Process for Robust and Sustainable Anaerobic Wastewater Treatment

With resources becoming increasingly scarce, industries have significantly optimized their processes to improve overall plant sustainability. This has helped reduce the impact on the environment while also directly improving companies’ bottom lines, due to significantly reduced costs associated with energy and freshwater consumption and reduction of hauled waste surcharges.

Anaerobic technology has become a go-to method to optimize wastewater treatment within a compact footprint and reduced costs. The wastewater obtained from industrial processes such as brewing are particularly conducive to anaerobic treatment due to their high rbCOD content, which can further be captured as a renewable resource in the form of biogas. Traditional treatment systems use either aerobic technologies which require a large energy input to degrade the organic pollutants or conventional anaerobic technologies that require a high level of operational and maintenance input and are prone to performance failures due to influent variability.

The use of a novel anaerobic technology utilizing high surface area plastic biomass carriers helps address the issues by providing a stable matrix for keeping the anaerobic bacteria within the reactors helping achieve high loading rates, with high uptime despite flow and load variations, thereby reducing impact on plant operations and improving overall efficiency. Depending on the incoming wastewater strength and temperature, the high methane content biogas produced often has the capacity to power the entire treatment process at the plant, while the lower biosolids production associated with the anaerobic process helps reduce the disposal costs at the brewery. Further pairing the anaerobic process with ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis membranes based treatment helps polish the effluent to very high standards. This paper discusses examples of implementation of the above concepts at breweries where the effluent or a portion of it, is re-used within the plant.

The implementation of biomass carrier based anaerobic treatment technology paired with membrane filtration can thus help industries reduce their ecological footprint and greatly improve their sustainability metrics, by not only recovering resources from waste such as energy and water, but at the same time save on operational and disposal costs thereby having a direct positive impact on their bottom line.