Zero Liquid Discharge Systems

Zero-Liquid Discharge Systems

What is Zero-Liquid Discharge?

Zero-Liquid Discharge (ZLD) is a treatment process that allows recovery of water or desired solvents and dehydrating the remaining constituents in a solid form. As such, only high-purity water or solvent remains, and no liquid waste is produced.

Industrial and chemical processes heavily rely on water and solvents. However, most of the waste produced, including the liquid waste, is dumped in either landfills or waterbodies. Some of the waste cannot be recycled by conventional methods and some waste is partly recycled or reused, even when the waste contains valuable constituents that could be reused.

How Petro Sep provides 99.9% Purity

Petro Sep has pioneered innovative membrane-based systems that can be customized to treat, process and separate liquid waste streams resulting in zero liquid waste (zero liquid discharge or ZLD). Petro Sep’s existing products, such as AQUA-SEP™, VOC-SEP™ or AZEO-SEP™ can easily recover water with up to 99.99% purity (ultrapure water) from various streams and even separate mixtures that cannot be separated through conventional distillation, such azeotropic mixtures of ethanol recovery.

For example, a conventional wastewater recovery reverse-osmosis (WWRO) plant generally provides up to 75-85% efficiency in water reclamation and contaminant removal. Petro Sep membrane.

systems that can further treat water and recover valuable compounds and chemicals and recover high-purity water and solvents with zero-liquid discharge (ZLD).

Similarly, a desalination RO plant may remove 60-75% of the salts and return the remaining retentate, a highly concentrated brine, back to the water source. Over time, the returned brine is likely going to affect the salinity of the source feed and will further compromise RO plant efficiencies.

Petro Sep systems can be designed to separate complex fluid mixtures, recycle solvents and their constituents may be further reduced to solid states, resulting in a Zero-Liquid Discharge at the end of its cycle.

Petro Sep membranes resist salt damage and can further treat the reject brine from desalination plants upwards of 99.99% purity at lower temperatures than conventional distillation methods and produce a zero-liquid discharge.

Other Applications For Zero Liquid Discharge

There are numerous other applications where Petro Sep solutions can entirely recover the source solvents out of the wastewater and thus providing a multifold economic and environmental benefit for existing operations requiring a ZLD treatment.

Environmental Benefits

ZLD helps build a safer environment through recycling input solvents and minimizing waste and its disposal.

Industrial plants consume solvents and produce wastewater that is usually discarded and disposed of in environmentally disastrous manners.

This enables the recycling of the input solvents and substantially reduces the by-product waste and its treatment or disposal.

For example, with Petro Sep systems, high-value solutes that remain in the waste stream by many industrial processes, such as L-Quebrachitol (rubber), paint (automotive), ink (print), toxic organic solvents (electronics & semiconductor)…etc., maybe recovered with virgin-grade quality and ultrapure water (UPW) as a by-product.