Processing, December 2015

Ask Dan the Wastewater Wizard in infrastructure and process equipment should always be seriously considered and intelligently executed But before making those decisions make sure your procedures are the best they can be Experience proves this the best policy With the initial project phase complete at the company discussed here additional investments are now being considered More chemical usage may not improve wastewater treatment If you have been doing it the same way for a long time now have you ever asked yourself Would it be possible to reduce chemical usage and still optimize wastewater treatment As our next story begins an international manufacturing facility has been hit with an excessive one time noncompliance surcharge of many thousands of dollars The accounting involved if nothing else draws corporate management scrutiny A project to investigate the source of the non compliance surcharge was launched Local managements first Write In 106 step was to call for an information gathering meeting with the plant manager All relevant plant personnel from engineering and operations the chemical supplier and the service contractor were also invited as well as me sometimes known as the Wastewater Wizard I was tasked as a fact finding and problem resolution project manager One week in advance of this meeting the project manager was given access to an information gathering tool available for my initial introduction to the operation Besides familiarization with the system what data points were available for remote access was clarified The tool also made it possible to chart the various project phases What was readily available in terms of good information were the discharge permit wastewater treatment requirements process units chemicals instruments and wastewater treatment controls as well as treatment operators their license levels operator skills and work schedules Lay of the land From the project managers point of view the first thing to recognize was that this was a physical chemical wastewater pretreatment facility This 12 December 2015 Water Waste Processing www waterwaste com type facility operates under a discharge permit issued by a sewer authority that receives the treated industrial waste and subjects it to further wastewater treatment in its municipal treatment plant before discharging it into an environmental stream Gathering information about the process started with a look at chemical usage and at how use of chemicals impacted process results Unfortunately for the industry we discovered that the chemical supply company with responsibility for monitoring chemical usage and ordering had been derelict in its duty We learned that the chemical supply company was selling the user more chemicals to the tune of thousands of dollars each month than were needed for best results The chemical supplier sales representatives who were not accountable for the wastewater treatment results were taking advantage of weak wastewater treatment management With the wastewater supervisors authorization we took control of chemical usage which action from one day to the next dramatically reduced Ringing up reports Reporting systems were initiated as part of information gathering One system