Rethinking Industrial Water Treatment with Advanced Technology

The webinar hosted by DuPont's Water Academy and moderated by Kip Vangsgard, focused on innovative approaches to industrial water treatment using advanced technology. Tina Arrowood, a PhD Organic Chemist, emphasized how water can be made Accessible, Adaptive, and Affordable (Three A’s) using advance treatment technology. Tina presented a way to envision this by thinking in terms of “Water Refineries” rather than “Water Treatment” which aims to unlock unconventional waters as fit-for-purpose water resources through the use of advanced technology.  Introductions were made to digital tools like WAVE and the Water Solutions Sustainability Navigator as available mechanisms to assemble these technologies into suitable system designs and to compare designs options to balance system performance, cost and sustainability impact.  Finally, a case study from the Textile Industry in Tamil Nadu, India, showcased how membrane based Minimal Liquid Discharge (MLD) reduces the cost to treat wastewater when Zero-Liquid Discharge (ZLD) is required.  When combined with the circular value of the water and salt collected from the ZLD process, the overall treatment process is found to be cost competitive to treatment processes that don’t require ZLD. The webinar concluded with a call to take a holistic view on water management and consider how available technology can be used to improve water resilience.

Speakers

• Tina Arrowood, Sustainability Manager, DuPont Water Solution
• Kip Vangsgard, Americas Marketing Manager for Industrial Water & Energy, DuPont Water Solutions

Key Takeaways

1. Advanced Water Technology: Advanced technology in industrial water treatment can synergistically reduce operational costs while also improving sustainability metrics.  
2. Lower Energy Membrane Innovations: lower operating cost and CO₂ savings can be enabled by the adoption of lower energy reverse osmosis membrane technologies. 
3. Water Refining: Water refining is a way to improve water accessibility by converting a high proportion of unconventional waters such as wastewater into fit-for-purpose fractions that can be reused.  
4. EU Water Strategy: The EU strategy prioritizes “Water Efficiency First” over increasing abstraction, which is a shift from the current state where more abstraction is often the lowest cost option.   
5. Digital Water Tools: Digital tools like WAVE and the Water Solutions Sustainability Navigator help design reliable systems and compare sustainability metrics. 
6. Wastewater circularity: The circular value of both water and salt present in Textile Wastewater helps to off-set the cost operating a ZLD wastewater system and increase affordability.

"Can we reshape our thinking from water scarcity to water sufficiency? I mean, that would be pretty cool. And then moreover, can we do it without breaking the bank?"

Tina Arrowood, Sustainability Manager, DuPont Water Solutions

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