How Much Does Industrial Wastewater Treatment Cost?

How Much Does Industrial Wastewater Treatment Cost?

Investing in an effective treatment system is crucial for businesses that generate wastewater. It ensures compliance with environmental regulations and demonstrates a commitment to sustainability. 

However, the price tag of implementing and maintaining such a system is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Understanding the factors that influence industrial wastewater treatment costs is key to making informed business decisions and avoiding unexpected expenses down the line.

Read on to learn more about the costs of treating industrial wastewater.

The Variable Cost of Industrial Wastewater Treatment Systems

The cost of industrial wastewater treatment systems varies widely depending on the project’s complexity. Simple equipment replacements may be relatively affordable, while comprehensive system upgrades can easily require investments in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Projects addressing complex wastewater streams or requiring multiple treatment stages can surpass a million dollars in cost.

Factors driving cost variability:

• Simple Equipment Replacements: Replacing a single component like a clarifier could cost around $40,000 to over $150,000 depending on your wastewater volume.
• System Upgrades: These often require additional pumps, tanks, treatment equipment, and more sophisticated automation. Expect an investment of between $65,000 to $200,000 based on needs.
• Complex Wastewater: Wastewater streams with multiple contaminants may necessitate multiple treatment steps including a polishing stage if certain contaminants have a very low discharge limit. Depending on the volume to treat, you could be as low as $400,000 but easily exceed $1.5 million or more. The need to remove BOD/COD can sometimes double the cost.

These numbers are estimates from projects that range between 25 gpm to just over 100 gpm. Costs can vary greatly based on various factors as discussed in this blog. Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your needs.

Primary Factors Influencing the Cost of Wastewater Treatment

While the costs can vary widely, the following primary factors typically have the most significant influence on the price of an industrial wastewater treatment system:

• Flow (GPM): Larger volumes of wastewater necessitate larger tanks, pumps, and overall equipment.
• Discharge Limits: Stricter regulations often require additional treatment steps or equipment to ensure compliance.
• Specific Contaminants (BOD/COD): Addressing these contaminants might require specialized and expensive equipment, such as anaerobic or aerobic digesters.
• Wear and Tear: The type and concentration of contaminants present in wastewater can significantly impact the wear and tear experienced by equipment. For instance, highly acidic or corrosive wastewater may require specialized materials and frequent maintenance to prevent equipment degradation. Similarly, high-volume usage can also contribute to faster wear and tear.
• Consumable Components: Systems will inevitably require the replacement of certain components over time, such as pH probes, meters, and flow and level transmitters. Additionally, chemical costs can add up over time – especially if your system is not optimized.

Lifetime Cost Considerations

The upfront cost of a wastewater treatment system is only one piece of the financial puzzle. It is essential to consider the long-term costs associated with operation, maintenance, and potential upgrades.

Anguil understands the importance of lifetime costs. We work closely with clients to:

• Assess Lifespan Expectations: Design systems for their intended longevity (e.g., 15-20 years vs. 30+ years) to balance initial investment with long-term needs.
• Account for Maintenance: Help clients understand regular maintenance requirements and expected replacement cycles for components.
• Anticipate Future Needs: If tightening regulations or changes in your wastewater composition are likely, your system should be adaptable to avoid costly overhauls.

Contact us to better understand the solutions available for your wastewater treatment requirements.

Strict Regulatory Compliance 

Environmental regulations governing wastewater discharge are becoming increasingly stringent. This often translates to tighter discharge limits imposed by publicly operated treatment works (POTWs) on businesses. 

Companies may need to upgrade or modify their existing systems to remain compliant, particularly when addressing contaminants such as pH, metals, COD/BOD, and nitrogen-based compounds.

Commonly Overlooked Cost Factors

Businesses often focus primarily on the cost of the wastewater treatment equipment itself. However, hidden expenses are associated with integrating and installing a new system into your operations. Sourcing and managing additional contractors adds time, cost, and the potential for miscommunication.

Anguil’s turnkey solutions eliminate these hidden costs and your risk exposure. We can handle system integration and installation entirely in-house. This streamlines the process, potentially saving you money and eliminating the hassle of managing additional contractors.

Significant Cost Savings with In-House Wastewater Processing

Companies often see significant savings when switching to in-house wastewater treatment compared to hauling and disposal costs. Anguil has worked with clients who have achieved remarkable returns on investment (ROIs) with in-house wastewater treatment. 

Some clients have seen ROIs as fast as 1½  years, while a typical range falls between 3 and 4 years. With hauling and disposal costs rising in recent years, in-house treatment presents an increasingly attractive and financially feasible option for many companies.

Anguil Saves You Money Long-Term

Investing in a high-quality wastewater treatment system is key to significant long-term savings. Anguil’s approach ensures your system delivers efficiency and value over its entire 20-30-year lifespan:

• Tailored Solutions: We’ll work with you to understand your specific wastewater challenges and priorities. This allows us to design a system that addresses ease of operation, operational costs, and overall cost of ownership for optimal long-term value.
• Lab-Backed Decisions: Our in-house lab allows us to evaluate all treatment options. This helps us determine the pros and cons, capital costs (capex), and operational costs (opex). A data-driven approach ensures you’ll get the most cost-effective system.
• Optimized Chemistry: We carefully optimize your chemical usage to minimize long-term operating costs throughout the system’s lifespan.
• End-to-End Responsibility: Anguil manages everything from initial discussions through installation, commissioning, and ongoing service/support. This single-source accountability ensures seamless execution and eliminates the unexpected expenses caused by miscommunication or poorly integrated systems.

Anguil – Your Partner in Cost-Effective Wastewater Solutions

Anguil helps you control the cost of wastewater treatment. We’ll explore all viable solutions to find the most cost-effective system for your needs. We do not manufacture a specific product type, such as a slant plate clarifier. 

This allows us to examine all types of clarifiers (DAF, Ballasted floc, lamella) and point out the pros and cons of each as they relate to your wastewater and initiative objectives. This multi-solution approach holds true for all your contaminants of concern you need to remove/reduce. 

Click below to learn more about the cost-saving benefits Anguil delivers with our wastewater treatment services.

Read About A Wastewater Expense Crisis

Industrial Wastewater Solutions Overview

Most industrial facilities produce some volume of wastewater, which can range from 1 gallon per minute to millions of gallons per day. To protect the soil and groundwater from contamination, industrial wastewater treatment solutions must be efficient while meeting environmental standards. Read on to learn more about industrial wastewater treatment processes and what options are available for your application.

Click to Expand

Industrial Wastewater

To minimize the effects of highly contaminated wastewater on the environment, many industrial facilities have to implement wastewater pretreatment plants that treat industrial wastewater to acceptable standards for discharge to a municipal wastewater treatment plant or to the surface (into lakes or rivers). These pretreatment plants remove solids, VOCs, metals, fats oils, and grease such that the final effluent is compliant with local and national laws and regulations. Industrial facilities must also properly dispose of solids that the waste treatment process generates or removes.

In the United States, total water use is estimated at around 322 billion gallons per day. Industrial applications use nearly half of that total. To ensure compliance with existing laws, facilities must adequately manage any organic and inorganic pollutants generated during production processes that might otherwise contaminate water supplies. Different kinds of wastewater contamination will need different strategies to facilitate the proper removal of contaminants.

Industrial Wastewater Treatment Solutions

The primary focus of most wastewater treatment solutions is to discharge wastewater in compliance with national and local regulations. The secondary goal is to be as cost-effective as possible in the treatment of wastewater.

Anguil’s project approach has 4 distinct steps that lead to project execution. Project development entails understanding a client’s needs and respective decision criteria. Next, lab trials focused on meeting those criteria are executed in the Anguil lab. If conditions dictate, Anguil is prepared to do pilot testing at the client site. Through our lab and pilot testing, we can validate different technologies and treatment approaches to meet their needs, including capital cost (CAPEX) and operational cost (OPEX) comparison. If needed, we can provide automated options to reduce human involvement. We can even provide options for water reuse, ZLD (zero liquid discharge), or near-zero liquid discharge.

The project execution phase could include fully engineered, build-to-specification, turnkey, and customized solutions. In lieu of new equipment, execution may be retrofits or system upgrades.

At Anguil, our industrial wastewater solution capabilities include:

• System Expertise
• Equipment Alternatives
• In-House Capabilities
• Single-Source Responsibility
• Integration Capabilities
• Experience

Industrial Wastewater Treatment Solutions: Technologies

Industrial wastewater solutions use a variety of technologies. The following are some of the materials these systems remove and the technologies used to remove them:

• Dissolved metal materials can be removed through pH adjustment and clarification, ion exchange, and carbon technologies.
• Fats and oils/grease can be removed with dissolved air flotation (DAF) and oil-water-separators.
• Sludge dewatering happens when water is squeezed from sludge using filter presses, belt presses, rotary vacuum drums, and rotary screw presses.
• Suspended solids are removed by cartridge filters, ballasting, parallel plate clarifiers, DAF, flocculation, and bag filters.
• Soluble biochemical oxygen demand (BOD)/chemical oxygen demand (COD) is eliminated with MBBR, MBR, anaerobic, anoxic, bioreactor, and oxidation treatment.
• Total dissolved solids (TDS) are the measurement of the total dissolved amount of organic and inorganic solid materials present in wastewater. Reverse osmosis, ion exchange systems, and nanofiltration facilitate the removal of TDS.
• Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are often present in wastewater, requiring removal via air stripping, granular activated carbon (GAC) adsorption, or oxidation.
• Ultra-pure water requires the removal of minerals and other contaminants from relatively clean water. Reverse osmosis (RO), deionization (DI), ion exchange, ultrafiltration (UF), and microfiltration are a few technologies that can be leveraged to create ultra-pure process waters.

Industrial Wastewater Treatment Solutions From Anguil Environmental

At Anguil, we believe in clean air and water. Our founders built the company on the premise that public health, economic prosperity, and sustainability are intrinsically linked. If you would like more information about industrial wastewater treatment, contact us today!

What Is a Rotary Concentrator?

Many industrial processes produce emissions that must be neutralized before they can be safely released into the environment. Thermal and catalytic oxidizers are technologies that perform this crucial operation in many industrial air pollution control applications. Rotary concentrators are an add-on technology that enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of these oxidation processes. This blog explores rotary emission concentrators, including their applications, features, and benefits.

Emission Concentrator Overview

Click to Expand

A rotary concentrator is an air pollution control system that converts large volumes of air with low concentrations of solvents or volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into small-volume, high-concentration airstreams. The rotary concentrator is a front-end, pre-conditioning unit located upstream of a thermal or catalytic oxidizer, which destroys the pollutants. A smaller oxidizer can be used since the VOCs are concentrated from a large airstream into a smaller airstream, saving on fuel auxiliary energy, and space.

The most significant benefit of using a rotary concentrator in conjunction with an oxidizer is reduced operating costs. This comes from ​​providing a much richer airstream to the combustion device that acts as fuel, saving on operating costs. Rotary concentrators also eliminate the need for larger oxidizer systems, which allows for more efficient space management. The smaller-sized oxidizer also reduces the capital costs of the combustion device. Manufacturers can avoid unnecessary expenses while making space for production growth.

How Do Rotary Emission Concentrators Work?

The low-concentration, high-volume airstream first passes through the rotary concentrator, where VOC emissions are stripped away from the air and adsorbed onto the zeolite media. At this point, the process air is about 90-99% clean and exhausted into the atmosphere. Removal efficiencies from the rotor vary on the emission constituents. To increase efficiency at this stage, additional rotors can be put in series upstream of the oxidizer.

Spinning continuously at a slow rate, the concentrator wheel is comprised of two sections; absorption and desorption. As air passes through the Adsorption section, VOCs at normal temperatures will attach to the zeolite wheel while the clean air goes directly into the atmosphere. A small portion of the contaminated air is heated to elevated temperatures and used to desorb those VOCs from the wheel in the desorption section. The desorbed VOCs are in a much smaller airflow; roughly 5-10% of the original flow, and sent to the downstream oxidizer for final VOC destruction.

Rotary Concentrator Applications

Rotary concentrator systems work great for high-volume air streams with low VOC concentrations, ideally below 500 ppmv and when temperatures are below 100 °F.

Common applications include:

• Semiconductor manufacturing
• Chemical processing
• Fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP) manufacturing
• Manufacturing paints & coatings
• Paint Booth Overspray
• Surface coating
• Wood finishing
• LCD panel manufacturing

Rotary Concentrator Features & Benefits

Using an oxidizer in conjunction with a rotary concentrator is typically the most cost-effective solution when dealing with low-concentration, high-volume airstreams. Its upfront cost may be similar, if not less, than an oxidizer designed at full flow capacity. The real benefit of the concentrator is the reduced operational costs and secondary pollutant emissions. A paired concentrator/oxidizer uses much less auxiliary energy because the much smaller airflow being sent to the oxidizer has more thermal energy in the concentrated stream.

Regulations are increasingly mandating higher VOC control efficiencies. With most air pollution control systems focusing on inert VOC and destruction equipment, combustion devices must be able to handle larger volumes of air with lower VOC concentrations, and this machinery can be expensive. The Anguil rotary concentrator allows manufacturers to remain compliant with these regulations, save money and energy, and increase efficiency. As an add-on to existing thermal oxidizers, the rotary concentrator can reduce the amount of treated airflow by up to 95%.

Since oxidizers are designed for specific projects according to maximum airflow, manufacturers can save a significant amount of capital costs. Single rotor systems can handle up to 150,000 SCFM with multiple stages of zeolite reaching up to 99% VOC removal. Larger flow rates can be handled with multiple rotors in parallel.

Rotary Concentrator Options

Anguil Environmental Systems offers multiple technology options for destroying hazardous air pollutants, VOCs, and odors. We can help you select the most applicable equipment for your manufacturing operation. Our consultative approach with clients ensures they receive the best possible solution for the abatement objectives so you receive the best possible solution for your specific needs. Our options include:

• Multiple rotors in series or parallel for higher DRE/airflow
• Numerous zeolite media options to prevent polymerization
• High-efficiency filter plenums for protection against particulate exhaust
• Multiple options for desorption of air heat
• Completely integrated and automatically controlled concentrator and oxidizer systems

Emission Concentration Solutions From Anguil Environmental

Anguil Environmental Systems is a leader in providing engineered environmental equipment. We are fully committed to providing solutions for cleaner air at competitive prices. Our rotary concentrator solutions help clients remain fully compliant with regulations while providing the best possible capital and operating cost, as well as the lowest emissions of secondary pollutants. More information can be found on the Rotor Concentrator page.

At Anguil, we believe in clean water and air. Public health, sustainability, and economic prosperity are interconnected, and we are committed to promoting these values together. To learn more about how we can help your business with emission concentration, contact us today.