William Sarni, Water Foundry:
Make water a model for
added value
Thomas Lauritsen, Arla Food
Ingredients, explained how the
plant in Videbæk uses former
effluent water as technical water
Events ¦ IDM
Niels Osterland, MMS Nordic:
Technical water can be brought
exactly to a quality that is
required for a well defined process
Kris Lambert, Veolia: Re-use of
water increases the carbon
footprint of a plant
January/February 2022 ¦ international-dairy.com · 35
discharged into a nearby river. Now it is
subjected to a cascade of membrane filtration
followed by UV disinfection (and the
addition of growth inhibitors) making the
water suitable for cooling purposes. The
new technical water plant is highly automated
and will to reduce well water consumption
by 13%. At a later stage the new
plant’s capacity will be expanded so that
DP may come to a 85% re-use of water.
Water re-use increases the
carbon footprint
According to Veolia, a specialist in water
recycling, only 3% of fresh water is consumed
by the food industry worldwide.
The biggest gains therefore can be made
when water saving efforts are targeting
the supply chain. Recycled water can be
used for cooling or CIP means but never
in a product said Kris Lambert, Managing
Director, Veolia Water Technologies, Belgium.
Veolia does not recommend to install
a second loop for recycled water in food
plants as this is expensive and prone to error
by operators. When water is recycled,
processors should know that one m³ of
re-used water adds 0.402 kg of CO2 emissions
to the footprint of a factory. The cost
of 1,000 liters of technical water range
about 50 Euro cents. This cost tend, however,
to decrease as membrane lifetime
increases and membranes have become
cheaper anyway, Lambert said. Given the
the audience. Financial resources are allocated
to those plants where it matters
to invest in water saving, he added, while
the group also looks on to the communities
where the plants are located. Nestlé
knows about the psychological barriers
of customers when it comes to re-use of
water. Although, depending on the area,
technical water in plants has sometimes a
higher quality than fresh water, the group
does not allow recycled water to contact
products.
cost explosion of caustic, there is a new
trend in food plants to recover chemicals.
Here, the ROI is often less than a year.
Overall, the trend towards plastic recycling
makes water re-use sometimes secondary
as budgets are re-allocated in companies.
Making technical water
in practise
Niels Osterland, Managing Director, MMS
Nordic, explained technological features
of the DP project. It is important to notice,
he said, that it is not about re-used water
entering the production environment. The
technical water never gets in contact with
the product. And it is brought exactly to a
quality that is required for a well defined
process. The DP plant designed by MMS
Nordic has a low energy consumption, for
instance CIP is made at room temperature.
The plant produces also its own water for
membrane flushing and UF backwash. Nils
Osterland will publish an article in IDM
that describes the processes in more detail
soon.
Nestlé’s regional approach
Nestlé has joined the Alliance for Water
Stewardship and aims at having all factories
worldwide certified according to the
standards of this group by 2025. Some
35% of the Nestlé plants are located in
water stress areas, Carlo C. Galli, Technical
Director Water Resources, Nestlé, told
/international-dairy.com
