Winery, Textiles and Other Production Industry Wastewater Treatments

WINERY WASTEWATER TREATMENT

Treatment for Wineries

ThermoEnergy's wastewater treatment system for wineries offers significant advantages over biological treatment. Winery wastewater varies significantly over the growing and processing seasons in terms of volume and concentrations of contaminates. During the vintage season two-thirds of a winery’s wastewater can be generated and during this period the highest organic contamination occurs. Wastewaters from the washing of bottles and equipment such as filters and centrifuges during bottling have lower volumes but higher total suspended solids from inorganic bentonite or diatomaceous earths coated in organic material. Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) also vary over the growing and processing cycle with the highest concentrations found in the vinification season. However, winery wastewater is poor quality requiring added nutrients for biological treatment to avoid poor biomass flocculation and separation. Removal efficiencies for biological treatment systems can also significantly vary from 60-85% as organic loading rates vary during the seasons. Also during low organic loading periods such as bottling, biological systems tend to starve requiring two weeks to recover populations and suffering from lower removal efficiencies during these periods. Added caustic is needed for pH control before the water is discharged since biological systems do not return the wastewater to normal pH levels after treatment. Finally, biological treatment needs large expensive tanks and pumps which increase capital and operating costs and require a large foot print.

CAST System Benefits

ThermoEnergy’s winery wastewater treatment system avoids many of the disadvantages of biological systems while providing high COD and BOD removal efficiencies. ThermoEnergy’s winery wastewater systems are not affected by changing wastewater flows or by changes in COD/BOD concentrations. Our systems can easily treat any inorganic and organic contaminates. We require no pH adjustment since we remove nearly all of the organic material. Most importantly our systems have a small footprint and lower capital and operating costs because we do not require large tanks and pumps that biological treatment systems do. Finally, we recover the organics which can be used as an additive to animal feed and we also recover pure water which can be reused to wash bottles and equipment.

What is CAST® Technology?

The heart of the ThermoEnergy Winery Wastewater Treatment System is our CAST® technology. CAST is a flash vacuum distillation technology that is an efficient method of removing and recovering for reuse or recycle waste products. More information on our CAST technology can be found elsewhere on our web site. Our Winery Wastewater Treatment System process (see figure below) includes a clarifier to remove inorganics and a spinning disc filter to remove small particles to 5 microns prior to a reverse osmosis (RO) component. The RO removes all of the suspended solids. The organic rich reject water from the RO is typically about 30% of the influent flow. The reject water is sent to our CAST unit which produces pure distilled water for reuse in the winery and concentrates and recovers the solids. We can recover over 95% of the wastewater for reuse in the plant and the concentrated solids can be used as animal feed or disposed of in a landfill.

Winery Wastewater Treatment System

Click on the image to see a process flow schematic