A Necessary Expense
Unless your company is specifically in the business of processing industrial wastes, most waste treatment facilities are not seen as being a profitable part of the overall operation. Collecting, treating, and discharging or disposing of the waste residues is simply something that has to be done to keep a process plant in operation and in compliance with the regulations. So….how are you handling your residues? Are you losing product unnecessarily due to process inefficiencies? Are your back-end processes bottle-necking your main production line and limiting your productivity? Even worse, are you experiencing unwanted excursions in your waste treatment systems that lead to noncompliance with the environmental regulations?
We Can Help
PROCESS has the specialized expertise in waste treatment systems process design and operations to help ensure your residues are handled compliantly and cost effectively, allowing your production processes to operate efficiently and reliably.
Our Experience
The first step is to define the problem. What are the waste residues you are worried about? Wastes come in many forms, and have different handling requirements depending on which regulatory umbrella it falls under. Sometimes, a minor process change (such as modifying a chemical feed or recycling a byproduct stream) can significantly simplify the waste management required….sometimes not. However, it’s often better to look at the process as a whole rather than simply tacking a Band-Aid on the end, hoping it all will work out.
PROCESS has the ability to understand both the front-end process as well as the back-end waste treatment.
Depending on the type of plant operation and the type of residues it generates, the recommended strategy for handling the residues may be a simple single unit operation or it may be as complex as any production operation, containing many interactive unit operations. A few of the more common unit operations encountered in industrial waste processing include:
- Product recovery
- Gas Scrubbing/Stripping
- Adsorption/Absorption
- Chemical Treatment (oxidation or reduction reactions, neutralization / precipitation)
- Solid / Liquid separation (filtration, dewatering, drying, crystallization)
- Thermal Treatment (oxidation, catalytic conversion, vitrification)
- Biological Treatment (aerobic and anaerobic)
- And more complex methods (ion exchange, distillation, membrane separation, solvent extraction)
PROCESS has extensive experience in helping clients determine the best path forward when dealing with many types of residue streams. We design the process from the fundamentals up and build on the knowledge and expertise of our client, and specialized equipment manufacturers as needed, to help ensure the process we design will perform at an optimum level.
Assistance Now and in the Future
Waste minimization and the protection of our environment are major considerations as good process industry stewards. It’s something we all have to be concerned with in the design stage and during operations. We are able to use our knowledge of process design to formulate a logical design basis, perform a feasibility study, provide a detailed process design, and ultimately assist the client in operations startup of almost any type of waste treatment facility. PROCESS can also be instrumental in assisting the decommissioning stage of a process by using that same process knowledge to shut down and disassemble the process in the most effective manner. As part of such projects, PROCESS is also sometimes requested to provide Environmental Compliance Services to assure the client that all regulatory requirements are met.