Challenge
Life sciences and animal health is a wide-ranging industry. Anti-bacterials, anticoccidials, and vaccines play an important role in ensuring healthy livestock, which supports human health. Simultaneously, parasiticides, vaccines, and therapeutics play a key role in ensuring long, healthy lives for our pets. A Veolia customer is in the business of improving animal health and making food safer by preventing and controlling disease. Their solutions require pharmaceutical grade water to manufacture, which means they must also meet strict pharmaceutical manufacturing effluent guidelines set by the U.S. EPA. Facing a challenge in the long term ability to comply with the effluent regulations the customer contacted Veolia Water Technologies & Solutions. They had previously worked with Veolia so chose to continue the relationship to secure the readily deployable membrane bioreactor (MBR) solution.
Solution
Because the system was needed within a short timeframe, Veolia leveraged their mobile water fleet from the Norfolk, VA Service Center (Figure 1). Veolia’s mobile MBR fleet provides customers with fully integrated wastewater treatment systems that incorporate biological processes and ZeeWeed* 500 ultrafiltration (UF) membranes in compact, ready-tooperate units designed to treat wastewater for a variety of applications. ZeeWeed membranes are a reinforced, hollow-fiber, and immersed directly into the wastewater. The membranes draw permeate into the fiber using a gentle suction and act as a physical barrier, preventing suspended solids from being released into the effluent. Membranes are extremely cost effective since they require less energy and fewer chemicals than conventional wastewater systems. The MBR system is equipped with heat traced lines to keep any process lines from freezing. The rugged system is ideal for application for variable raw water quality and extremely high level of suspended solids.
The Service Center team worked to deploy an 80,000 gallon per day or gpd (303 m3 /day) mobile MBR to the customer’s location. The design solution provided by Veolia was based on treating influent water quality that included 300 mg/L COD, 140 mg/L TSS and up to 25 mg/L TKN with ability to provide the following final effluent quality parameters upon start-up: BOD5 <5, TSS (mg/L) < 5 and Turbidity (NTU) < 5 with 95% availability.
Result
The mobile MBR deployed to the customer’s site, was integrated within the site’s existing infrastructure and was running in less than 30 days once it was installed. The system was setup to receive feed from the customer’s wastewater lagoons. Following minimal sampling, the mobile MBR was approved to begin discharging MBR permeate with all parameters within the required specifications. The treated water was directed to a tributary of a local stream.