An alternative waste water treatment for Ardagh
Discharging polluted water onto open water in the Netherlands is subject to strict rules and it is very costly. The various regional Water Board Authorities carefully guard over any violation and fines are high. Therefore it pays out to get your act together on your own production site.
Facilities manager at the Ardagh plant in Deventer, Wim Dwars, said: “In fact, we always tried already to recycle as much water as possible on this Ardagh production site, like on all our other sites, so it was quite logical for us to find a similar solution when we installed two new DWI high-speed production lines for food cans in the last few years. With the help of the German company Enviro Chemie we designed and built a water treatment facility in which we purify our waste water at the source. The waste water that is released from various production lines on our production site is collected via trenches in a central flotation unit.
“By means of chemicals we deposit the polluting substances and once per day we press the sludge through a filter press. The remaining dry part of the sludge is transported away. For the rest, talking about water treatment, our DWI lines make two-piece cans from steel and regarding water treatment, that is much simpler than working with aluminium. We do not have to deal with the removal of chemicals like fluoride and phosphates. In the case of aluminium can production, these chemicals are present in the waste water and that makes the whole more complex.”
The plant management is happy with the current water treatment process because it is relatively cost-effective. “We meet all environmental requirements. Four times a year, we get a very severe inspection from the Water Board. They calibrate all of our meters. The water quality we obtain with our own water treatment method is such that we are even working on the application of this water in our toilets.”
