Food industry wastewater treatment

Water plays a vital role in processed food production, serving as a universal solvent, a key ingredient, and a critical component in various stages of manufacturing. Water serves as a carrier for additives, flavors, and nutrients that contribute to the taste, texture, and safety of the final products. It is also essential for cleaning raw materials, processing ingredients, cooling equipment, and ensuring hygiene standards throughout production.

However, the extensive water usage in food processing presents significant challenges. Most important are

1. the need for high-quality water to meet stringent hygiene and safety standards
2. managing the large volumes of wastewater generated
3. addressing environmental concerns, such as water pollution from processing residues

Promoting responsible water stewardship across the food processing supply chain is needed to sustainably meet the growing global demand for processed foods. To ensure regulatory compliance with water quality standards and mitigate environmental impacts of food industry wastewater, sustainable water management practices, including efficient water reuse and recycling technologies for food industry wastewater treatment are essential.

Food industry wastewater often contains different loads of organic compounds (and a wide range of COD).

In addition, there are specific challenges in food industry wastewater treatment, depending on the type of food processed. Such as fats, oils and grease (in dairy products and poultry processing), large concentrations of ammonia (in slaughterhouses, fish processing, yeast and gelatine production), large concentrations of phosphorus (in potato and fish processing) or large amount of solids in the effluent (in dairy and yeast production).

For each type of food industry wastewater, Paques has a solution.

• Our anaerobic reactors transform COD into valuable biogas and clean water, such as BIOPAQ^® UASB, BIOPAQ^® IC, BIOPAQ^® ICX and BIOPAQ^® RISE.
• The BIOPAQ^® AFR was developed to anaerobically transform FOG into biogas, eliminating the need for flotation (DAF).
• When solids in the food processing effluent are an issue, we offer our CBD^® technology, which eliminates pre-treatment.
• ANAMMOX^® allows excessive nitrogen to be removed, using up to 60% less aeration energy compared to conventional systems and without the need for an external carbon source.
• PHOSPAQ^® is a cost-effective and sustainable way to recover phosphorus by formation of struvite.
• THIOPAQ^® removes the H₂S from the biogas generated by our anaerobic technologies. Paques has also supplied a great number of complete turnkey wastewater treatment plants to the food industry worldwide, combining our technologies with pre-treatment and reuse technologies.