What is the Importance and How Does an Effluent Treatment Plant Work

Applying environmental awareness in the treatment of liquid waste

The effluent treatment plant design, is the main investment for anyone who wants to start treating the liquid waste produced by your company. The installation of an effluent treatment plant is necessary since, if liquid waste is not properly treated before being returned to the environment, it can cause irreversible damage to nature.

Inadequate disposal of effluents is responsible for polluting and contaminating not only soil or water, but also the ecosystems present in those sites that directly impact human health. In addition, effluent treatment laws at the international, federal, state and municipal levels are increasingly stringent, as well as the environmental awareness of customers, who are now giving preference to companies that are concerned with sustainability and have their own system Of effluent treatment plan.

What are Industrial Effluents?

Industrial effluent is the dumping of liquid waste pollutants from manufacturing processes that range from waste from the industrial processes themselves, to domestic sewage. That is, it is all water that is used in an industry and that then needs to be discarded and treated by an effluent treatment plan.

The industries that produce effluents and, consequently, must implement etp plant design, are the automotive industry, breweries, distilleries, dyeing, cosmetics, mining, pharmaceutical, food, animal feed, hygiene and cleaning industries.

An industry can use water for a variety of purposes, such as for washing the factory floor or some equipment in the production process, for incorporation into the product itself and for cooling systems and steam generators. In all of these uses, the industry is producing liquid waste that needs to be treated by an effluent treatment plant before being thrown into the wild.

This wide variety of industries and industrial activities can generate liquid waste with different characteristics, and in order to carry out the treatment and implement the appropriate effluent plant design, the company needs to know the effluent it is producing. For this, it is necessary to know certain particularities of the tailing, such as the volume produced and the specific composition, which involves toxicity, quantity of pollutant loads and organic load, presence of contaminants, concentration of components, among other aspects.

Implementation and operation of an effluent treatment plant

There are numerous processes involved in effluent treatment plant, such as physical, chemical, biological, batch and flow processes. There are also several types of reactors, such as fixed bed reactors, fluidized or expanded bed and sludge blanket. In order to determine which type of process and reactor is most suitable for each industry, it is necessary to know the characteristics of the effluent produced and to adapt to the needs of the company in question.

The biological treatment consists of removing the organic matter present in the liquid waste by two modes: anaerobic or aerobic processes. The aerobic process is characterized by the use of activated sludge, aerated lagoons, among other techniques, while the anaerobic process is marked by the use of biofilms, biocontactors and some lagoons. Physical treatment is responsible for removing suspended solids through separations such as filtration, flotation, and sedimentation. Finally, the chemical treatment promotes the removal of pollutants through the addition of chemical reagents and the consequent chemical reaction promoted by them, such as coagulation processes, oxidation, pH neutralization and chlorination for disinfection.