Brewing giant saves £100,000 annually
Veolia Water Technologies has supplied a bespoke water recovery system to Heineken’s Hereford cider mill in the UK. Looking to reduce its water consumption by 25 per cent by 2020 and as part of an overall environmental assessment, Heineken identified a potential saving from the water loss in the concentrate stream from its borehole water treatment reverse osmosis system.
Approximately 30m3/h of water was not being utilised and, using Veolia’s RecoBLUE online calculator, the company found that it could recover approximately 50 per cent of the reverse osmosis losses, at a quality of better than 120µS/cm conductivity, which would be suitable for use as boiler make up.
Veolia provided a specially configured Sirion Mega Recovery RO Unit. With low pressure, high rejection membranes, it has low energy consumption, which minimises its carbon footprint and operating costs.
The new system is reducing the cider mill’s water footprint by more than 130,000m3 per year of water, resulting in an annual saving of more than £100,000.
