How can food processing facilities reduce the resources and time spent on cleaning and wastewater treatment? Harish Anantharaman, MD, Accelerated Cleaning Systems India Pvt Ltd (ACS) explains.
The quality of water plays a major role in the food manufacturing process. It also ensures the right discharge standards or parameters to meet pollution control norms.
Whilst most manufacturers put a lot of effort into, and are willing to spend a lot of money on the process water, the attempt has always been to manage the post-production wastewater using the least amount of resources and costs. Some plants also suffer from lack of space and obviously, space for manufacturing is always a priority rather than for wastewater treatment plants.
In most of the food manufacturing processes, cleaning and sanitisation or rather, CIPs or COPs generate a major portion of the wastewater.
Replacing water with Nanobubble Aqueous Ozone (NAO) in the cleaning process could help reduce chemicals by up to 60%, water requirement by 60%, hot water by up to 100% and treatment time by 20-30%. NAO has or rather leaves no byproducts; it turns back to oxygen and water. What it effectively means is better results, using less resources and time. This pays for the investment in NAO systems itself in a very short time.
Less water and chemicals down the drain means less loads on the treatment plants, which makes it easier to achieve pollution discharge norms at optimised costs.
NAO is an FDA-approved, USDA-approved, FSSAI-approved, Green Seal-approved cleaner and sanitizer. It has also been classified as a food additive, which means no rinsing post washing. Washing vegetables and fruits with NAO would increase their shelf life and quality immediately.
Nanobubble Oxygen treatment systems are now also being used for aeration of treatment tanks to save energy and get more in less time or enhanced results. In most water treatment plants, using nanobubble ozonation systems as a pretreatment or post treatment process saves a lot of space and gives excellent reduction in parameters like Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Total Suspended Solids (TSS) in one single process, using almost a negligible amount of chemicals.
Nanobubble equipment consumes very less footprint and takes very less time for installation. It requires no major change in working patterns or process. It pays for itself in months.
ACS has been the pioneer in nanobubble technology systems and is the only one in India to offer and have installed both institution-based NBT systems for hygiene and huge industrial systems up to 40 m3 per hour for water treatment. Clients like Shell, BARC, UPL and DELL have all discovered a new, sustainable and carbon-friendly way to treat and clean.