GreenEnergyForEarth.com – Solar & Wind Power Products

How much energy is used to treat and deliver 2 million gallons of water to a bottling facility per year?  How much energy is then used to process and treat 2 million gallons of process water that is discharged into the city sewer system each year?  The answer is quite a bit.

Water Management Group, Inc. has supplied a low-cost, membrane process system for Shasta Corporation’s [Division of National Beverage Corporation; Nasdaq: FIZZ] Miami bottling facility for the purpose of recovering thousands of gallons of process water per day and approximately 2 million gallons per year that would otherwise be discharged to the city sewer system.  The Miami Bottling facility had been exceeding its permitted discharge limits and, as a result, been paying thousands of dollars in fees to the Miami-Dade Sewer Authority.

The Water Management Group (WMG) “Reuse” system is designed to recover approximately 75% of previously treated water used for bottling soft drinks and bottled water products.  For this facility, the cost of the equipment will be repaid in less than a year due to the cash savings that would have otherwise been spent on discharge fees.

 Additional savings come from the reuse of the product water from the WMG “Reuse” system. The water quality produced by the WMG system is so good that it is reused in the facility in several ways resulting in additional savings for Shasta.

“We are very pleased to have the opportunity to demonstrate that many beverage bottling companies, with similar circumstances, may not need to discharge huge amounts of “good” quality water to city sewer and pay thousands of dollars in fees” said Jeff Dunn, Vice President of WMG. “The water quality from the “Reuse” system is so good that the recovered water can be reused for process water and/or plant utilities.”

The concentrate water from the process RO system contains Total Dissolved Solids [TDS] levels of approximately <1000 ppm.  This water is considered “good” quality feed water and can be retreated by a second RO.  By doing so, the discharge to city sewer is reduced by 75%.  The product water from the second RO is approximately <10 ppm.  The portion of the permeate, 67.5 gpm, is recirculated to the feed side of the process RO system (RO #1). This further reduced water consumption at the plant and increases feed water and product water quality by decreasing city feed water TDS.

Another portion of the concentrate (28.5 gpm) from the Reuse RO (RO #2) can be used for cooling tower make-up. The high quality low TDS water will increase the current “cycles of concentration” of the cooling towers thereby further reducing water consumption of Miami municipal water.

Photo courtesy & © Water Management Corp.