Chemical manufacturing alternative water supplies
How to use alternative sources of water to the mains supply in your chemicals manufacturing business.
Although mains water is needed for some processes at your site, you can use lower-quality water for some applications such as cleaning, toilet flushing and wet air pollution control. Alternative water sources include:
- Captured rainwater for cleaning, toilet flushing, etc.
- Borehole and other abstracted waters (for example from a canal or river) for cleaning, boiler feed water, etc. You should meter your supplies to ensure you comply with your abstraction authorisations (if you need one) and to monitor use - don't use more water than necessary just because it is cheaper.
- Conditioning and softening water using a physical method (eg magnetic treatment) rather than ion exchange to eliminate brine waste.
- Wash waters, cooling water and condensate for lower-grade cleaning.
Consider simple local treatment such as settlement or filtration, to allow reuse, but make sure that using low-cost supplies does not increase overall waste and effluent generation. Remember that discharge costs are generally higher than supply costs.
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