What are you doing with your waste water?

[StoneCold]

What method do you use at your chemical plants to dispose of your waste water? Waste water being water that contains solvents as well as some solids? Are you evaporating the water and separating the solvent out either as a descrete phase or with carbon and then recycling the water? Are you incinerating it, either on site or off site? Are you filtering it and running it through membranes?
I am looking for some suggestions as to a practical way to dispose of 15,000 gallons a week of water contaminated with solvents,organic molecules and miscelaneous salts.

 

[moltenmetal]

tgmcg: burning water costs whatever the market will bear in the region and country in question for the compounds in question. Most of the cost is regulatory in nature rather than the cost of fuel gas to run the incinerator. Sorry, but I'm not in the biz and hence can't give you rates. Yes, halogenated wastewaters cost far more than non, just about everywhere.

Stonecold: you're doing a great job with your blowdown streams if there's so little water in them! 30% recovery renders the membrane system pointless. Consider evaporating that stream to dryness yourself- there's nothing in there (likely) that would render the resulting salts leachate toxic, so they probably would not be considered hazardous waste for landfilling- they'd therefore be very cheap to dispose of. This presumes you've got some low grade waste heat to put to use for this purpose, and a place to put the evaporator(s) and solids handling equipment. It also presumes your management won't prefer wasting operations money burning water to spending a little capital.

 

[inorganicmembrane]

For membrane I don't know what kind of membrane you used, and pore size of it.
My opinion is to use an integrated system, a bag filter, then inorganic membrane, at last organic RO system, it depends on the content of your waste water and your final treated requirement. If necessary chemical methods is also needed. Inorganic is expensive than organid membrane but the life is longer and average treatment cost is lower. If use Chinese membrane the total cost may be deduced.

 

[chemroopa]

We seperate the solvent in the vapors using scrubbers and sent the waste water to distillation column to recover our solvent. waste water from columns that contain about 1000ppm solvent is sent to a waste water pit and ten pumped to Gulf coast waste disposal for further treatment and disposal.

Cooling tower blowdown water will meet pH conditions. what are the contaminants in Floor cleaning water? If it is wit in the discharge limits, have a sperate waste pit to collect this water and adjust pH to dispose without incinerating. This way you can reduce the volume of water you send out for incineration. For the remainign gallons, use adsorption techniques.

 

[ProcessWaterChemist]

STONECOLD-

do you still have a problem? How many gallons went to incinerator in july & august?