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Axium Process has been operating in the food & dairy industries for over 20 years supplying bespoke water recycling systems that are designed to reduce discharge volumes and potentially recover up to 90% of the waste water as re-usable commercially sterile water for many industrial dairy applications.  The process utilises membrane filtration technology and is very well established and understood. With simple on/off operation contaminants are physically separated from the wastewater with +98% efficiency by Ultrafiltration (UF) Nanofiltration (NF) and Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology. Potentially valuable products such as protein normally lost to drain can often be recovered, reducing the bio-load, while creating additional revenue streams.

Effluent treatment broadly falls into three main categories:

• Biological – Bugs reliant on a stable environment, large footprint, difficult to scale up
• Chemical – Simple, but costly over the long term, environmentally damaging
• Physical – High up-front capex, economically effective over the long term

All options should be carefully evaluated to ensure the desired outcome is a success.

Food and Dairy Processing effluents are discharged with high concentrations of suspended solids (SS) dissolved solids (TDS) organic materials such as, fats, oils, grease (FOG) along with protein, lactose, and minerals. Without rapid treatment the waste can also become malodorous because of decomposition in the contaminants. This group of effluents is often subject to high disposal charges and risks breaching environmental regulations without effective treatment.

Effluent composition varies with the industry but is normally derived from animal and vegetable sources where organic loads contribute to high levels of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD), while automatic cleaning processes (CIP) create wildly fluctuating acidic and alkaline conditions.