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Industrial Waste Case Study

A Recycled Water system was introduced at Swan Brewery in order to reduce its overall site water consumption.

This would not only reduce demand on our State’s limited drinking water sources, but would also reduce the amount of wastewater discharged back into the environment. And of course, there are dollar savings as well – in both water consumption charges, and wastewater disposal costs.

Overview

Swan Brewery recognised that it could potentially re-use good quality water that was currently being discarded to its waste water treatment plant. Opportunities were sourced to use this second grade water in non-product related areas. As such, a recycled water system was devised whereby, used water was re-directed to storage, from where it was then distributed to non-product related services upon demand.

The recycled water system collects from four different sources:

• Beer Cellar Refrigeration: water used to defrost the evaporator coils on the ammonia refrigeration chillers.
• CO₂ Purification: cooling water used removing heat from purified CO₂ gas, collected from the fermentation process.
• Packaging: water used to internally rinse cans prior to filling.
• Rainwater: collected from 340 m² of roof space.

Collected water is transferred into a storage facility, where it is then pumped to evaporative condensers and cooling towers. It is used as make up water for water loss due to evaporation and salts removal.

Outcomes

The end result is a system that recycles approximately 50,000 kL/year of water, or 9% of Swan Brewery’s non-product water use. Re-use also diverts the same 50,000kL from the wastewater stream, reducing the volume into Swan’s on-site wastewater treatment plant by an equivalent percentage.

The water recycling system is fully scalable, and has the potential for future expansion as more opportunities for water conservation and waste reduction are identified.  For example, in this financial year, Swan will be implementing another series of collection sources for its Recycled Water System.  This will include the capture and re-use of back flush solution generated by regular maintenance of the Reverse Osmosis membranes at Swan Brewery's water treatment plant.  This project will save a further 20,000kL of fresh water per year, and expand their Recycled Water collection volume by 40%.

This system does not involve any complex treatment processes or fancy engineering. In fact, it is remarkably straightforward. It is simply a case of identifying avoidable resource wastage, capturing rainwater that is otherwise lost, and re-using the water in other applications on site.

And you don’t have to be a well resourced industry leader like Swan to do that!

Why not give some thought to resource usage within your own business, and see what windfall environmental gains and financial rewards might be waiting for you…