Tag Archives: Wastewater

A Novel Tool to Meet Water Compliance and Quality Requirements in the Food and Beverage Industry

Here we propose a technology that offers a new suit of capabilities to support you in different challenges arising from meeting regulatory standards.

Discharge and Trucking Costs

Some of the areas of regulation that are proving hard to meet include the removal of pesticides, colour and hard to treat recalcitrant organics, especially at trace level. To treat regulatory compounds to levels acceptable for discharge can result in having to truck waste or absorb discharge fees. Finding means to treat waste on site and to higher standards with the right technology can help reduce cost. The Arvia ODC is very competitive to existing methods at removing trace level toxic organics on site to meet quality and regulatory standards for discharge to sewers.

Water Quality and Consistency

The need to ensure a high quality of raw materials is essential for production. This is particularly the case with water where the chemical composition of water supplied can vary in quality and purity. Water can have a major impact on the taste and flavour of products and therefore often requires further treatment. Arvia Technology’s Organic Destruction Cell (ODC) effectively removes micro-pollutants in potable water to ensure a purified and consistent standard for production. This includes the removal of pesticides, sweeteners and endocrine disruptors that are traditionally difficult and expensive to treat.

Recycling of Water

Increased water scarcity and hikes in water rates makes water reuse an attractive option to ease water dependency. Arvia Technology helps companies ease their water dependency by reducing the amount of RO reject water. The Arvia ODC works alongside Reverse Osmosis (RO) as a secondary process that is easy to fit into your current system. It can also be used to polish process water and waste water to improve water recycling rates.

Arvia Technology supports the Food and Beverage Industry by providing an environmentally friendly solution with no chemical additives or waste.

Come to our presentation ‘Optimising Water Usage in the Food and Beverage Industry’ on September 17th to find out more about this solution for improving your water cycle.

 

How many of these pharmaceutical wastewater issues are you addressing?

Integrated processes

‘End of pipe’ filtering is out. The new trend is to look at making water treatment an integrated part of process design. Since water recycling is currently less efficient for highly contaminated waste streams and those containing a diverse range of chemical properties, we believe the solution is to separate wastewater streams early in the process and destroy harmful pollutants near the source. Water that easy lends itself to recycling is separated from that which is less suitable. This would help ensure minimum effort and expense are required to deploy additional techniques in the process.

Water scarcity

Water is a precious resource. Only 3% of the Earth’s water is freshwater and more importantly less than 0.3% is available for use, with this use being split between the conflicting needs of public water supply and industry. Both for cost and environmental reasons, there is advantage in reducing water movement and contamination. The goal is often to maintain supply at the required quality level while controlling costs of transport, treatment and disposal. Regions with plentiful water supplies continue to use water in various processes and discharge it after use, but in regions suffering water scarcity every drop is valuable. How do you manage your water resources?

Sustainability

Alongside water scarcity, the viability of recycling both water and other materials is also a trending topic. We think cost and energy efficiency can be increased considerably by closing industrial water cycles as far as possible and identifying innovative materials for use. This subject is integral to our aims at Arvia. Arvia Technology is at the forefront of the sustainability revolution with our patented adsorbent material Nyex. Nyex is an adsorbent 3D electrode material used to separate contaminants from water so they can be eliminated with a low voltage electrical current. The Nyex is also cleaned in the process meaning it can be re-used continuously.

Changing parameters

The composition of process water is changing over time, especially in an area of high innovation such as pharmaceuticals. The Arvia process is flexible enough to treat a wide range of effluents and its modular construction makes it ideal for a changing landscape.

Environmental impact

Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in pharmaceutical wastes can have harmful effects on human health and aquatic life. Endocrine disrupters from medicines have been detected in drinking water and surface water, adversely affecting water quality. ‘Environmentally persistent pharmaceutical pollutants’ (EPPP) is a new emerging policy under consideration for the SAICM in 2015 http://www.saicm.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=452&Itemid=685 Are you feeling the pressure from the media as more stories come to light every day revealing the presence of dangerous pollutants in our rivers and lakes?

Related article:

http://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/news-and-analysis/features/pharmaceuticals-in-the-environment-a-growing-problem/20067898.article

Cost

How much do you spend on wastewater treatment and transport of wastewater? An internal review showed that Arvia Technology offers significant capital and operational expenditure savings in comparison with major treatment technologies for pharmaceutical organic wastes. A case study for a system that treats 10m3/day of pharmaceutical organic wastes of concentrations of 150 – 200 ppm shows that Arvia can achieve efficient treatment at a substantially lower OPEX per m3. Arvia Technology becomes the most cost effective (combined CAPEX and OPEX) after 4 months of operation, compared to reverse osmosis, activated carbon, advanced oxidation processes or trucking off site.

As the first water treatment process capable of destroying recalcitrant, stable organics and trace level pollutants without the use of chemicals, Arvia Technology can perform an important role in removing persistent micro-pollutants and emerging contaminants from those difficult waste streams. In an efficient water management system treated water can feed into the next process, but only once a reliable technology such as Arvia is in place to ensure it meets specific quality standards.

Come to Arvia’s presentation, ‘Pharma Wastewater Solutions: the next era of trace level organics removal’ on Wednesday 8th July to find out more about novel solutions to wastewater treatment.

Nigel Brown: Founder, Inventor, Ideas man, Outdoor lover…

Nigel Brown2

Dr Nigel Brown is the Founder Director of Arvia Technology – a company based in north-west England which has patented an innovative method of removing micro-pollutants from water.

Dr Brown’s extensive scientific knowledge combined with practical experience make him one of the world’s leading authorities on the removal of micro pollutants from water and wastewater.

Trained in chemical engineering and environmental engineering, Dr Brown has had a far-reaching global career in the water industry which has included work in India, Canada, China, Italy and the US.

After university he spent 7 years as an international water and effluent troubleshooter for Foseco, ensuring the company fulfilled its obligations on  water treatment around the world. He then joined as Process Engineering Manager for Simon Hartley Limited, a company specialising in the manufacture and design of effluent plants and equipment. Later, as an independent consultant he specialised in water management and wastewater treatment – which sparked his interest in improving traditional methods of removing toxic chemicals.

The technology at the core of Arvia was developed at the University of Manchester, where Dr Brown, working with Dr Ted Roberts, was a research fellow in the department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science.

 

  1. What are you looking forward to explaining to the audience?

What I get excited about is the journey from initial research in my garage laboratory through academic research at the University of Manchester to the creation of Arvia Technology to exploit it. It is describing both how the technology works and the benefits that this can give to potential customers.

  1. Why did you decide to do a webinar with Business Review Webinars?

In our search for a webinar company to help us share our message, Business Review Webinars have shown to deliver a wide cross section of high quality and interested participants from across the globe.

  1. What has been the best moment in your career?

I think the best moment was the decision to go independent and work as a researcher and consultant. The ability to undertake my own research and find the means to support that was an exciting time. It was the initial stages of what was to become Arvia Technology.

  1. What’s the best book you’ve ever read and would recommend?

The Lord of the Rings has to be the best book I have ever read. The vastness of the storyline combined with the imagination and creativity. It is just epic!

  1. What motivates you?

To me it’s the application of knowledge. Taking all the research I do from an idea and being able to apply it to solve real problems. I like to sit on the academic and industrial interface and try to apply new ideas to solve problems.

6. Why are you particularly interested in the environmental side of things?

I particularly enjoy the outdoors so being able to address environmental issues is a real driver. The impact of humans on the environment is becoming increasingly significant, anything we can do to mitigate that is worthwhile.

7. What are you looking to achieve in the future in your personal and professional life?

In my professional life it is to see further large scale Arvia installations extending the process into disinfection, which is an exciting new development. Personally, the cost of getting the kids through university will be a major achievement.

8. How did you get into the industry and what do you most enjoy about your role?

By chance I worked with a company that assigned me a project in the water industry, which made me the company expert in this area. I was then given lots of other water problems to solve, which I very much enjoyed. The research side of the role is the most enjoyable. Being able to play in the lab is precious time, so it would be great to have more time to do that, but at this stage the main thing is to share what problems Arvia can already solve.

9. What has been your best holiday and where would you recommend visiting?

Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. That was so fantastic I have been 3 times. You get drenched with the spray. As its so wet there is rainforest all around and the water creates an amazing mist.

10. What’s the most useful thing someone has taught you?

There is nothing stopping you pursuing your goals. Continue doing what you want to, until told otherwise. Senior Engineer I worked with in my first job called David Wilks.

Nigel will be presenting in Arvia’s webinar ‘Pharma Wastewater Solutions: the next era of trace level organics removal‘ on the 8th July at 3pm London/10am New York. You can register for the webinar here.