This document discusses water usage in dairy manufacturing and strategies for closing the water usage loop. It provides data on the water content of different dairy products and effluent, and how advanced water treatment plants can treat brine and waste to allow water recycling within factories. The document encourages exploring further opportunities to reap the benefits of advanced water treatment techniques but notes that fully realizing their potential requires further work.
5. A mass balance
Whole Milk @ 88% H2O
0.88 L water / L milk
Town Water
0.80 L water / L milk
Effluent
1.18 – 1.64 L water / L
milk
Non-fluid Dairy @ 4 -50% H2O
0.04 – 0.50 L water / L milk
6. Closing the loop … sort of
Whole Milk @ 88% H2O
0.88 L / L milk
Non-fluid Dairy @ 4 -50% H2O
0.04 – 0.50 L / L milk
Effluent
0.18 – 0.64 L / L milk
Town Water
0.30 L / L milk
… plus 0.5L / L for
beneficial reuse
Executive Summary. Can we close loop on waste water from dairy manufacturing by making loop bigger? Either along the supply chain or broader by including local community? Answer, don’t know. But do know “salt” is potential sticking point. Leading to opportunity for audience to provide solutions on salt and potentially help answer question in the affirmative – yes, we can. Anecdote – (about power point presentations) part I.
Anecdote – (about opinions getting you into trouble) part II
Anecdote – (about the value of disagreeing) part III
An opinion – that industrial ecology does not work
Connection with dairy manufacturing is water mass balance.
Even with combination of technology and beneficial re-use (eg surface flows or irrigation) you cannot close loop on bulk of dairy production (cheese, powders etc). Individual dairy enterprises cannot close loop on water. They have to take broader “ecological” approach.
Can reduce volume of water at the factory by recovering 50% of water for reuse at point of source. Unproven economics, re who gets benefit, but could pay back inside three years.
In terms of cleaning, innovations can recover more product, reducing volume of cleaning water required, also reducing its subsequent burden downstream.
Burden downstream is due to lost product (milk solids). Industry average is around 1.5%. Evidence shows identifying where losses occur (ie it is not just CIP burden) will usually lead to 15% loss reduction, costed @ 44c/L milk recovered.
After volume and soil reductions, we can apply beneficial reuse eg clean condensate to surface water. Then we can apply advanced waste water treatment, where evidence of benefit is clear eg staged recovery to potable at Inghams chicken works, Brisbane.
But. The problem is, this solution cannot be applied at inland dairies. The end point of RO in any advanced WWTP leads to concentrated salt. [Coastal salt crystallisers, WA]
In a simple schematic of advanced WWTP eg as installed by Inghams, top right might as well read “brine waste”. Even sophisticated desal plants simply dump waste brine to sea. But what to do with it, inland?
Recovery of a product is problematic, largely because aggregated brine from dairy is not salt. In dairy, sodium in wastewater is 60:40 split between caustic and salt. So. Dairy factories cannot close loop internally, because too much new water is coming in daily via milk. It might be possible to close the loop by returning recovered water via irrigation, but only if we can find sinks for contained sodium (and waste organic). How?
Call to arms on behalf of GVW and its recent announcement of a “Market Sounding” exercise – what are the potential technological and business model options?
[If asked: photo is detail of trees that lost complete canopies after Kinglake fire. Example of resilience through regeneration. If sodium in irrigation water accumulates too far in soil however, there is no regeneration. There is no bounce back.]