Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD)

Looking to decrease your facility’s water footprint?

With tightening regulations on using water and discharging liquid waste, zero liquid discharge could be the answer.

Wastewater can often be difficult to manage, especially when local regulations prohibit discharge or enforce stringent effluent quality requirements. SAMCO offers a range of technologies that can help you treat and recycle discharge waters back into your process for reuse, a technique that recovers all fluid waste by utilizing our state-of-the-art filtration and thermal technologies.

These systems can help your facility:

• handle variations in waste contamination and flow
• allow for required chemical volumes adjustments
• recover around 95% of your liquid waste for reuse
• treat and retrieve valuable byproducts from your waste (i.e. salts and brines)
• produce a dry, solid cake for disposal

The specific technologies that will make up a facility’s ZLD treatment system will vary greatly depending on (1.) the volume of dissolved material present in the waste, (2.) the system’s required flow rate, and (3.) what specific contaminants are present, but will generally consist of a three-step process with the following “blocks” of treatment:

1. Pretreatment and conditioning; removes simple things from the wastewater stream that can be filtered or precipitated out, conditioning the water and reducing the suspended solids and materials that would otherwise scale and/or foul following treatment steps.
2. Phase-one concentration. Concentrating is usually done with membranes like reverse osmosis (RO), brine concentrators, or electrodialysis. These technologies take this stream and concentrate it down to a high salinity and pull out up to 60–80% of the water.
3. Evaporation/crystallization. After the concentration step is complete, the next step is generating a solid, which is done through thermal processes or evaporation, where you evaporate all the water off, collect it, and reuse it. The leftover waste then goes from an evaporator to a crystallizer, which continues to boil off all the water until all the impurities in the water crystallize and are filtered out as a solid.

Call SAMCO today to see if we can propose a custom-engineered solution to improve your recovery volume, efficiently recycle and reuse your process waste, and meet your local discharge regulations while helping you recover and concentrate valuable byproducts.

If you’re like many of the customers we’ve had in the past who seek ZLD solutions, you may be asking the following:

• What is zero liquid discharge and how does it work?
• How do you choose the best ZLD system for your facility?
• Does your facility need zero liquid discharge technology?
• What are common problems with zero liquid discharge and how do you solve them?
• What are the best companies for zero liquid discharge equipment and technology?
• How much will a zero liquid discharge system cost your facility?

Still have questions?

We’re ready to help. Contact us to set up an immediate call with one of our engineers.