How we helped a Fortune 100 Company Save Water, Energy, and Waste by Optimizing their RO System

314M+

Liters Water Saved Per Year

86.35%

New Average Recovery

331

Less Membranes Going to Landfills

The sustainability group of a beverage company needed to implement a water reduction program across five facilities. We were able to guide and direct the required system changes to not only exceed their water savings expectations, but also save energy, cut capital costs, and reduce waste.

Solving Issues Related to Water Resources

Maximizing system recovery represents the biggest opportunity to meet water consumption reduction goals in reverse osmosis systems. This is not always easy to achieve, but we were able to guide and direct the required system changes to help identify savings by optimizing the membrane system recovery rate and modifying other processes such as filter backwash and automatic rinses.

As a result of these efforts, the average water consumption savings per facility was over 60.5 million liters per year, with one facility saving over 124.9 million liters per year. All five facilities totaled a water savings of close to 314 million liters per year.

Realize Sustainable Energy Use

Reverse Osmosis is one of the most energy-efficient and commercially viable desalination processes. Lower recovery facilities require more energy to process water. The facilities’ five systems were designed to operate at 75% recovery. By switching to Vitec™, we helped increase the recovery, which resulted in water and energy savings.

For perspective, when the recovery increases from 75% to 85% the cost savings in energy use can be reduced on average by 13.9%.

Reduce Waste

During operations, minimizing waste is critical to reducing the environmental impact of reverse osmosis membrane systems, which often result in landfill waste and have implications in terms of embedded CO₂. Although the average membrane element service life should average about five years, several of the facilities were replacing all of their membranes more than once per year.

We recommended targeted antiscalants, applied proper system operation procedures, and updated cleaning chemicals. As a result, the customer reduced membrane replacement by 63.3 % less, which saves 331 of their membranes from ending up in landfill every year.