Your Process and Wastewater
At Hydroflux Industrial, our engineers are fully conversant with the internal production processes of all different types of dairies.
This understanding of your process and the sources of the wastewater enables us to design complete treatment plants that work efficiently, economically and consistently under all conditions.
In general, wastewater from milk processing factories contains high concentrations of organic material such as proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids. These substances result in elevated levels of suspended solids, oil and grease, biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD).
The actual composition of the wastewater from each facility depends on the actual production methods employed, but from the point of view of a wastewater treatment designer, there are adequate similarities to enable designs to be made, even for Greenfield sites.
The majority of the wastewater comes from cleaning processes and cleaning of equipment that has been in contact with the milk. Due to a variety of sterilising agents and various acidic and alkaline detergents used in the cleaning process, the pH of the wastewater varies significantly from as low as 2 to 12 and sometimes even higher. Because of this considerable fluctuation in pH, wastewater balancing is essential for all milk processing plants.
As the most commonly used CIP chemicals used are sodium hydroxide, nitric acid, phosphoric acid and sodium hypochlorite, wastewater from milk processing plants will also contain quite high levels of nutrients and sodium which can also require addressing in a wastewater treatment plant.
A further consideration of wastewater treatment designers is the frequency of shock loads experienced at milk processing plants. Although hopefully, not a common occurrence, spills, equipment failure or operational errors do occur resulting in short term very high effluent loads. Considering that the BOD of milk is over 100,000mg/L, the impact of a spill can be quite significant to the operation of the wastewater treatment plant.
At Hydroflux we are familiar and experienced in treating wastewater from dairies and design our treatment plants to perform, and perform consistently under all conditions.